Senior Backend Engineer
Industrious is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer in New York, United States. It pays $150k-$170k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Industrious.
Level's read on this job
- Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- The posting mentions LangChain, Kafka and AI agents among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Industrious has 62 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Senior backend engineer to build customer-facing services and design production-ready AI agentic systems and MCP servers.
About the Company:
Industrious is the largest premium workplace-as-a-service provider and home to the highest-rated workplaces in the industry. Everything we do comes down to creating great days for teams of all sizes and stages, including our own. We believe that what makes a great day at work is the people on your team and the problems you get to solve together. We’re looking for people who love thinking outside the box and thrive in a truly collaborative setting. As teammates, we encourage new ideas and toast every win. We’re excited about having a meaningful impact on people’s workplace experience.
Great days also start when everyone can be their authentic self at work. Diversity of backgrounds, thoughts, and ideas is critical to our success in delivering great workplace experiences, both for our members and for each other. Industrious is committed to creating an inclusive, respectful environment that embraces your individuality and quirkiness. You are valued for who YOU are. We celebrate our people as individuals who can accomplish great things when we work together as one team.
To learn more, visit www.industriousoffice.com/careers.
About the Role
Industrious's Growth Engineering team owns every customer-facing surface we build: the member portal, the mobile app, the public site, for a member base growing alongside 100+ new locations this year. This Senior Backend Engineer seat is backend-leaning, genuinely full-stack, and comes with early access to the decisions that shape what gets built, not just how. You'll own production systems real members rely on every day, and design real AI agentic systems, agents, MCP servers, and the guardrails that keep them safe in production, not just use AI coding tools day to day.
You'll join a team of five to six, reporting to our Growth Engineering Manager. Code ships often here, you'll see the result of your work in the product within days, not quarters, at a company that's profitable, CBRE-backed, and still scaling fast.
What Might Your Day Look Like
It's Wednesday, Hub Day, so you're in our New York HQ with the rest of the local team. Standup surfaces a reservation-access bug: a member's on-demand booking isn't unlocking their room. You trace it through a Kafka event that never fired, patch the service, and ship the fix before lunch.
In the afternoon you sit down with Product and Design to look at the next iteration of the credit-expansion feature, the one that lets members book new locations with their existing credits. You flag a data-modeling tradeoff nobody had considered, sketch two approaches, and the three of you land on one together, before a single ticket gets written.
Later, you pick up a small frontend fix on the member portal. It's not glamorous, but it's yours to own like everything else here.
What You Will Own
Build and operate the backend services (Node.js, TypeScript, Kafka, MongoDB) powering the systems thousands of members use every day.
Drive the expansion of our member credit system so members can book new locations, and lead the reservation-experience redesign in our newest member portal.
Own reservation-based access: the system that gets a member into the exact room and location tied to their on-demand booking.
Push our site's performance and reliability forward for our members as an ongoing discipline, not a side project.
Ship across the stack, backend, frontend (React, Next.js), and occasionally mobile (React Native, Expo), so the team is never blocked by a single layer.
Design and build AI agentic systems, agents, MCP servers, and the guardrails that keep them safe, as we integrate intelligent features directly into our core platforms.
Help the team get sharper with AI-assisted engineering as we build that muscle together.
You Will Love This Role If...
You love owning a real slice of a product thousands of members use every week, not maintaining someone else's legacy system.
You thrive on a small team where you're expected to touch the whole stack, not stay in one lane.
You're comfortable moving fast and fixing forward, especially now that AI tooling makes course-correcting cheaper.
You want your technical read to shape what we build, not just how we build it: a seat at the table before a ticket exists, not after.
You want to build your track record somewhere genuinely growing, not managing decline: Industrious is profitable, CBRE-backed, and still scaling fast, and this puts real infrastructure ownership in your hands while that happens.
You're low-ego and direct, and you know how to read a room: when to jump in and when to let someone else run.
You want to design AI agentic systems yourself, not just use AI coding tools day to day, alongside real depth in event-driven backend architecture.
This Role Is Probably Not for You If...
You want a large, specialized team where backend, frontend, and mobile are always someone else's problem.
You'd rather have every requirement fully locked before you start than propose an approach and validate it as you go.
You need a fully remote setup: this role is based in New York, Austin, or Chicago with in-office Hub Days every Wednesday.
You prefer polishing one thing for months over shipping, learning, and adjusting quickly.
You've used AI coding assistants day to day but haven't actually designed or shipped an agentic system yourself.
What We Are Looking For
A real track record shipping and running production backend services in Node.js and TypeScript, including event-driven systems (we lean on Kafka).
Hands-on experience designing and building AI agentic systems (AI agents, e.g. LangChain or ADK, MCP servers, production AI guardrails and monitoring), not just day-to-day use of AI coding tools.
Genuine full-stack range: you've shipped production React work too, and you're glad to pick up mobile (React Native, Expo) when it's needed, not just backend.
Comfortable with NoSQL data (we run MongoDB), and with picking up ambiguous problems and driving them to a working solution.
Nice to have: Next.js experience.
Compensation & Benefits
This role comes with a base salary of $150,000 - $170,000 and is eligible for our annual bonus and participation in our long-term incentive program. But compensation is only part of the story.
At Industrious, we believe a good workplace supports the whole person. Not just the work they do. Our benefits are designed to give people the stability, flexibility, and room to grow that make a career sustainable.
Our Benefits May Include:
Heavily subsidized medical, dental, and vision plans to support you and your family
Flexible paid time off, to maintain balance
Paid parental leave to help you welcome a new child and focus on what matters most
Annual professional development grants so you can keep learning and growing
401(k) retirement savings program to support long-term financial wellbeing
Wellness initiatives and additional employee support programs
Specific benefits may vary by role, location, and eligibility requirements
Equal Employment Opportunity: Industrious is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity. We have a long-standing commitment to providing equal employment opportunity to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, veteran status, political belief, or any other basis protected by applicable law.
How we rate this
Senior Backend Engineer at Industrious rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Pay
- This job starts at
- $150k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 11% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where full stack was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where mcp was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used LangChain in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Backend, Full Stack, MCP, and LangChain. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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