Senior Software Engineer
Workato is hiring a Senior Software Engineer in San Francisco, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Workato.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- The posting mentions Claude, Claude Code and RAG among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Workato has 62 other open roles on Level.
- Posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
About Workato
Workato is the leading Control and Execution Platform for Enterprise AI — the neutral platform enterprises trust to put AI to work across their business. Workato unifies data, applications, and processes into a single platform so AI can reliably orchestrate business processes in production at enterprise scale. Built on more than a decade of running mission-critical processes for over half the Fortune 500 — including Nasdaq, Amazon, Cisco, Vodafone, Atlassian, and Lucid Motors — Workato turns over 14,000 enterprise systems AI needs to act on into one governed execution layer. For more information, visit workato.com.
Why join us?
Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company.
But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care. That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives.
If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you!
Also, feel free to check out why:
- Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on”
- Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world
- Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America
- Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers
We're looking for an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to help build the distributed backend that powers our AI agent platform and the developer-facing products around it — the event-driven services, real-time integrations, and APIs that let agents reliably do real work. You'll be building the systems that need to stay correct and available on our path to 1M users over the next year. In this role, you will also be responsible to:
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Build event-driven, horizontally-scalable backend services that process work reliably and correctly even when parts of the system fail.
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Build real-time surfaces and integrations — streaming connections, gateways, and CLIs — that hold up under load.
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Integrate LLMs and agentic harnesses into production systems.
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Drive features end-to-end — from ideation and architecture through deployment, observability, and iteration.
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Raise the engineering bar through clean, well-tested code, thoughtful reviews, and mentorship.
Qualifications / Experience / Technical Skills
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5+ years shipping and operating production backend systems at scale.
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Strong proficiency in Python, and the judgment to write clean, well-tested, maintainable code under it.
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Deep distributed-systems fundamentals: you know how to keep systems correct and available under partial failure, backpressure, and load — and you design for it by default.
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Hands-on experience with event-driven, streaming, or real-time systems (queues, pub/sub, long-lived connections).
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Comfortable operating services in production on Kubernetes in the cloud — and instrumenting them with metrics, tracing, and dashboards so you can debug what you ship.
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Solid API and software-architecture instincts; you make and defend sensible trade-offs in ambiguity.
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LLM/agentic and developer-facing product experience (MCP, RAG, APIs, SDKs, CLIs) a strong plus.
Our stack: Python, FastAPI, Postgres, Kubernetes, AWS. You don't need prior experience with all of it — we care that you can pick it up fast.
Soft Skills / Personal Characteristics
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High agency and ownership: You drive work end-to-end, from ambiguity to shipped and iterated, without waiting to be told.
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A reliability mindset: You design for failure, not just the happy path.
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Product-minded: You care about the users using what you build, not just the system behind it.
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AI-native: You use modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code) in your daily workflow and stay at the cutting edge of what it can do.
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Excellent written communication: We work async and write things down.
(REQ ID: 3006)
How we rate this
Senior Software Engineer at Workato rates 66 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
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- Typical software engineer job
- $167k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- What are the limits of Claude that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- What's a project where you used Claude Code hands-on?
- Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, Claude, and Claude Code. 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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