Backend Engineer, Agents
Lapel, San Francisco
- Pay
- $150K–$250K / year
- Work type
- Not stated
- Level
- Not stated
- Area
- Software engineering
- Posted
- Sep 25, 2026
About the role
At Lapel, we believe the most hospitable companies win. We're building the data, infrastructure, and tools that help customer-facing teams understand every customer and act on that insight at scale throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Most internet businesses want to treat customers well, but their tools work against them. We’re building the layer that makes every interaction feel personal again: unifying context, coordinating action, and closing the gap between intent and experience.
It’s a technically ambitious challenge spanning data infrastructure, AI, and systems design – with a deeply human outcome: helping software companies serve people better. We call it hospitality at scale.
We’re well-funded, backed by top-tier investors, and already working with exceptional companies, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises. We’ll share more details when we talk.
About This Role
You’ll own the systems that power long-horizon agents at Lapel: how they remember, retrieve context, reason over customer history, use tools, take actions, and improve over time. This includes the memory, orchestration, observability, evaluations, and internal frameworks that make agents reliable across our products.
We believe that AI should be used to help scale the human moments and deliver exceptional service across any customer touchpoint. Your job is to build the infrastructure that makes that possible.
What You’ll Do
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Design systems that help agents remember, summarize, and retrieve context across long-running customer interactions
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Build workflows and tools that reduce failure modes and make agents easier to trust in production
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Set up the observability and eval infrastructure we use to monitor agent behavior, debug issues, and raise quality over time
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Help to scale multi-tenant systems that keep customer and agent context isolated, reliable, and ready for enterprise use
Our Stack
Lapel is built end-to-end in TypeScript in a single monorepo.
-
React, Vite, and Tailwind on the frontend;
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Node.js and Postgres on the backend;
-
Temporal and Pulsar to power orchestration.
We ship quickly, and care about creating a developer experience where anyone can prototype, experiment, and get ideas into production fast.
You'll Thrive in This Role If You
-
Have 5+ years of backend or software engineering experience, with a track record of building reliable systems in production
-
Have owned large-scale, enterprise products end-to-end
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Are excited to build the systems that make AI agents more useful, dependable, and easier to improve
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Are comfortable designing APIs, working with databases, and building workflows that run reliably over time
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