Remote | Senior Backend Engineer — $50–$100/hour at 24-MAG in New York, New York, United States

Job description

• About the job Remote | Senior Backend Engineer — $50–$100/hour
• We are sharing a specialised consulting opportunity for experienced Senior Backend Engineers with strong expertise in backend development, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, networking, IAM, observability, and production-grade systems engineering to contribute to an advanced AI training and reinforcement-learning environment project.
• Selected professionals will create realistic reinforcement-learning environments that test advanced AI systems on production infrastructure challenges involving system design, deployment, troubleshooting, security, scalability, and recovery. The work requires strong backend and infrastructure engineering judgement, reproducible technical environments, deterministic validation, and robust reference solutions. No prior experience in AI is required.

Responsibilities

• Reinforcement Learning Environment Development
• Design realistic technical environments for evaluating AI systems
• Create infrastructure scenarios involving deployment, troubleshooting, scaling, and recovery
• Define clear technical requirements, constraints, and expected outcomes
• Build reproducible environments suitable for deterministic evaluation
• Develop scenarios that reflect authentic production engineering challenges
• Distributed Systems & Cloud Infrastructure
• Design scenarios involving production-grade distributed systems
• Work across networking, service communication, queues, and durable storage
• Evaluate infrastructure architecture for reliability, scalability, and resilience
• Apply sound systems-design principles to realistic cloud environments
• Incorporate operational failure modes into environment design
• Identity, Security & Access Control
• Develop scenarios involving Identity and Access Management
• Evaluate authentication, authorisation, permissions, and access-control decisions
• Incorporate infrastructure security considerations into technical environments
• Identify common configuration or security failure modes
• Ensure environments reflect realistic production-security requirements
• Validation & Golden Reference Solutions
• Develop deterministic validation tests for technical environments
• Create golden reference solutions demonstrating correct implementation
• Define reliable acceptance criteria for AI-generated solutions
• Ensure environments produce consistent and reproducible evaluation outcomes
• Validate both expected behaviour and failure conditions
• Failure Scenarios & Recovery Testing
• Create intentionally defective environment variants
• Design failure scenarios involving infrastructure, networking, storage, or deployment issues
• Test recovery strategies and troubleshooting approaches
• Evaluate disaster-recovery and fault-tolerance behaviours
• Ensure scenarios meaningfully test operational engineering judgement
• DevOps & Infrastructure Automation
• Apply DevOps practices to environment creation and maintenance
• Work with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation
• Develop scalable and repeatable deployment workflows
• Incorporate observability and operational monitoring where relevant
• Build maintainable systems suitable for repeated technical evaluation
• Technical Documentation & Collaboration
• Document architecture, operational flows, assumptions, and edge cases
• Produce clear technical explanations supporting environment reproducibility
• Collaborate with technical leads and project participants
• Refine specifications and acceptance criteria based on feedback
• Communicate technical trade-offs and design decisions clearly

Requirements

• Strong professional backend-engineering experience
• Proven expertise in one or more of C++, Python, Rust, GoLang, Java, or JavaScript
• Strong practical experience with DevOps and cloud infrastructure
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation
• Demonstrated ability to architect, scale, and secure distributed systems
• Deep understanding of networking concepts
• Strong knowledge of Identity and Access Management
• Experience with message queues and durable storage systems
• Familiarity with observability, monitoring, and operational diagnostics
• Strong understanding of rolling deployments and disaster recovery
• Experience troubleshooting production-grade systems
• Ability to design deterministic tests and reproducible technical environments
• Strong technical documentation and communication skills
• No prior AI-training or model-evaluation experience is required

Skills

Required

• Backend development
• Distributed systems
• Cloud infrastructure
• DevOps
• Networking
• IAM
• Observability
• Production-grade systems engineering
• C++
• Python
• Rust
• GoLang