Junior Software Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a motivated and technically strong Junior Software Engineer to join our engineering team. You'll work on robust systems and workflows that enable internal users and the overall development of the product. You will build backend services, integrate with external APIs, and collaborate with the team to meet their use cases. This is a hands-on role where you'll have the agency to think and act to drive fast/iterative progress across multiple fronts.

What You'll Do

• Design and build backend services and APIs that are accessible, fault-tolerant, and well-tested.

• Integrate with third-party and internal APIs to extend product capabilities.

• Work with AI agents and LLM-powered workflows, applying sound engineering practices (testing, validation, guardrails) to ensure robustness.

• Write and reason through unit and integration tests, thinking critically about coverage, edge cases, and failure modes.

• Collaborate with senior engineers on system design, service orchestration, and architectural decisions.

• Take ownership of small-to-medium scoped features end-to-end, from design through deployment and monitoring.

• Work with data stores and infrastructure tooling relevant to the stack.

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• 0–2 years of professional experience or a strong portfolio of shipped personal or academic projects with a clear backend focus (bonus if live or deployed).

• Proficiency in Python and/or a solid grasp of an end-to-end backend stack; full-stack experience is a plus.

• Experience integrating with external APIs (REST, GraphQL, webhooks, etc.).

• A testing mindset — ability to think about how to validate, test, and harden implementations rather than just writing code that works on the happy path.

• Comfort working in a collaborative codebase using Git and standard development workflows.

Good to Have

• Hands-on familiarity with common backend tooling: SQL/NoSQL databases, Redis (caching), message queues (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and search platforms like OpenSearch/Elasticsearch.

• Exposure to AI agents or LLM-based systems, with an understanding of how they work and where they can fail.

• Experience with Docker and container basics in a development or production context.

• Familiarity with any cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and basic deployment/infrastructure concepts.

Bonus Points

• Experience building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers.

• Experience designing fault-tolerant or resilient workflows that recover gracefully from failures without data loss (e.g. idempotent jobs, retry logic, dead-letter queues).

• General understanding of ML concepts, enough to engage meaningfully with product requirements and the models powering our systems.

• Prior experience in a startup or fast-paced engineering environment.

What You'll Gain

• Ownership of features aimed at varying use cases, with real production impact.

• Agency to make technical decisions and drive solutions end-to-end.

• Exposure to modern AI/LLM engineering practices.

• Mentorship from senior engineers across backend, ML, and platform.

• Experience working within an agile team on meaningful, high-visibility work.

• A clear growth path toward a mid-level engineering role.

Why Join Us

• Work on one of the hardest, most impactful problems in defense AI.

• Collaborate with a small, world-class team of researchers and engineers.

• High ownership from day one shapes the platform, not just maintains it.

• Move fast, learn fast, we build, test, and iterate aggressively.

• Be part of a mission-driven company where AI meets national security.

Auric AI is building the future of defense intelligence. If you’re an AI-native product builder who thrives in a fast-paced, high-ownership environment, we’d love to hear from you.