Staff AI Backend Engineer at Mural – Agent Platform in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Career Trajectory: This is a senior/staff-level backend engineering role squarely at the frontier of AI infrastructure — agent orchestration, LLM memory systems, and agentic evaluation pipelines are among the hottest and most transferable skills in the 2024–2025 market. Engineers who build production-grade agentic systems are commanding significant premiums across the industry.
Compensation Context: No salary is listed, which is a minor yellow flag for transparency. For a 7+ year senior/staff backend engineer with AI/LLM expertise in the US, market rates typically range from $200,000–$280,000 total compensation at product companies. UK equivalents typically fall in the £90,000–£140,000 range. Candidates should benchmark accordingly in negotiations.
Skills You'll Develop:
- Agentic AI architecture — orchestration, durable execution, tool use (highly in-demand)
- LLM evaluation frameworks and observability pipelines
- Distributed systems at scale (Azure, Node, MongoDB)
- Technical leadership: mentoring, hiring, and shaping long-term AI strategy
Culture Signals: Mural is a well-funded Series C collaboration startup. The language around "curiosity, collaboration, and inclusivity" and contributing to hiring suggests a mid-growth-stage company where senior engineers have real influence on direction. The focus on amplifying human creativity rather than replacing it suggests a thoughtful AI strategy.
Green Flags: Clear technical scope, staff-level ownership, and a genuinely novel problem space. Watch for: absence of explicit PTO, equity, or salary details — clarify these early.
About the Team
The AI Foundations Team at Mural is pioneering how generative AI transforms visual collaboration and decision-making. We're a remote-first group of engineers, designers, and product thinkers focused on helping teams work together more effectively. Our goal isn't to replace human creativity — it's to amplify it, building AI that enhances how people align, communicate, and make decisions visually.
Your Mission
You will design and build the core AI systems and platforms that enable Mural's next wave of agentic, AI-driven collaboration experiences.
Rather than building isolated AI features, you'll work on the core backend systems that power Mural's agent platform, including agent orchestration, durable execution, contextual memory, tool integration, observability, and evaluation. Your work will enable intelligent agents to reason over product context, act on behalf of users, and operate reliably and safely at scale.
What You'll Do
- Build the core backend systems that power Mural's agent platform, including orchestration, durable execution, tool execution, memory, observability, and evaluation infrastructure
- Design scalable services and APIs that allow AI agents to retrieve context, coordinate multi-step workflows, interact with Mural data, and act reliably on behalf of users
- Develop the agent memory layer, including systems for conversation context, product context, retrieval, summarization, compaction, and long-term context management
- Create infrastructure to monitor, debug, and improve agent behavior through traces, metrics, feedback loops, and offline evaluation
- Translate complex, open-ended product needs into clear backend architectures, service boundaries, data models, and implementation plans that align technical capabilities with user value
- Help define the technical direction for agentic AI at Mural, contributing to long-term architecture and strategy
- Champion engineering excellence, mentoring others and establishing best practices for building reliable AI systems
- Contribute to team growth through hiring, process improvements, and fostering a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and inclusivity
What You'll Bring
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with strong expertise designing, building, and operating reliable production systems, scalable services and APIs, and well-defined system architectures
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems for complex workflows, including orchestration, asynchronous processing, job execution, retries, event-driven architectures, long-running processes, and failure recovery
- Familiarity with AI, LLM, or agentic systems, including concepts such as tool use, context retrieval, evaluation, or model orchestration
- Strong focus on production quality, including observability, reliability, testing, security, maintainability, and incident response
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to produce clear technical documentation and collaborate cross-functionally
- Experience working full stack or collaborating closely on product-facing frontend experiences
- Deeper AI/ML experience, especially with LLM evaluation, experimentation, embeddings, and retrieval systems
- Experience with knowledge graphs, graph-based data modeling, entity resolution, or relationship-aware retrieval systems
Our Stack
Azure OpenAI, React, Node, MongoDB
Equal Opportunity
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role fully remote or does it require office attendance?
What level of AI or LLM experience is required for this role?
What is the technology stack used by the AI Foundations Team at Mural?
How many years of experience are required for this position?
Does the role include mentorship or leadership responsibilities?
