AI Backend Engineer
AI Backend Engineer
Payments & Reconciliation
Department: Engineering
Reports to: CTO
About the Company
They’re crafting the finance-first All-In-One Operating System for Education in Latin America—unifying payments, billing, collections, student systems, academic flows, communication, and financial ops.
Serving 1,000+ schools in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador, they empower hundreds of thousands of families with modern, rock-solid experiences for parents, students, teachers, and admins.
Backed by elite global fintech and edtech investors.
Their mission: equip schools to run with precision, accuracy, and unshakeable confidence—fueled by cutting-edge tech and AI automation.
As they scale across LATAM, AI stands as the unbreakable core of their product and engineering dominance.
Role Overview
They’re hunting an AI Engineer to architect, construct, and unleash AI-native systems that ignite automation, intelligence, and operational supremacy across their products: Payments, Collections, SIS, Billing, Factoring, and Credit.
You’ll dominate the crossroads of LLM engineering, backend mastery, data orchestration, and agentic firepower, morphing chaotic manual ops into hyper-scalable AI juggernauts for thousands of schools and hordes of families.
This gig fuses backend sorcery, LLM symphonies, RAG arteries, evaluators, agents, and GenAI fortresses. You’ll lock arms with Product, Data, Backend, and Ops to alchemize vague business riddles into battle-hardened AI weapons that shift massive financial tides.
High-stakes, total-ownership in a blistering arena—for builders of genuine, production-grade AI, not toy prototypes.
What You’ll Lead
1. Build & Deploy AI Systems
Design and build AI-powered microservices (Python/FastAPI) for inference and decision automation
Implement LLM workflows using LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or MCP-based architectures
Build RAG pipelines: ingestion, chunking, embeddings, retrieval, re-ranking
Integrate AI features into the company’s products (Payments, Collections, Billing, SIS)
2. AI Agents & Automation
Build agentic workflows for data reconciliation, anomaly detection, financial validation, compliance checks, and school-specific automations
Design structured tool-calling, guardrails, and self-correction loops
Implement event-driven AI pipelines connected to Kafka/SQS
3. Retrieval, Data & Evaluation
Implement and optimize vector stores (pgvector, FAISS, Weaviate, Milvus)
Create evaluation dashboards and automated evals to benchmark AI reliability
Build observability around prompts, costs, latencies, and error handling
4. Backend, APIs & Systems Engineering
Build scalable APIs integrating AI models with the company’s microservice ecosystem
Deploy AI services on AWS using ECS, Lambda, SQS, Aurora, Redis, S3
Ensure security, compliance, PII protection, and safe AI usage
5. Product & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Partner with Product and Operations to translate business needs into AI features
Convert prototypes into robust, production-ready services
Work with Data Engineering to power training, feature engineering, and retrieval
Required Qualifications
4+ years in software engineering, data engineering, or ML engineering
1+ year hands-on forging LLM-powered systems (agents, RAG, pipelines, evaluators)
Steel-sharp Python skills; FastAPI edge preferred
Battle-tested with LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or MCP
Vector DB mastery: FAISS, Milvus, pgvector, Pinecone
Seamless integration of OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Gemini, Groq, or kin APIs
SQL fluency and relational dominance (PostgreSQL/Aurora)
Command of REST/gRPC API architecture
Relentless ownership and action bias
Skill to weaponize ambiguous problems into rapid-fire solutions
Crystal-clear communication and collab prowess
Thrives in startup velocity
Full pro fluency in Spanish and English (written & spoken)
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with:
RAG optimization (hybrid search, re-ranking)
AI observability (OpenTelemetry, Evidently, custom evals)
Redis, Kafka, SQS, event-driven architectures
Prompt engineering & safety pipelines
Prior firepower in fintech, payments, or mission-critical systems
Responsibilities may vary, but can include
Build and own AI microservices end-to-end
Design and implement agentic workflows for automation across billing, reconciliation, collections, SIS
Evaluate and tune LLM performance, latency, cost, reliability
Implement guardrails, safety policies, and PII protection
Collaborate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and roadmap planning
Document workflows, APIs, prompts, evals, and data flows
Why Join
Become a cornerstone of the new AI Engineering powerhouse
Forge AI systems delivering tangible financial and operational blasts
Team up with elite engineering, product, and AI squads
Shape reliability for millions of tuition transactions annually
Remote-first vibe with autonomy, ownership, and rocket-fuel growth
Chance to architect LATAM’s ed-fintech backbone
Career acceleration as product, engineering, and platform explode
Location: Flexible (remote from Latin America)
Travel: Occasional to Mexico City for team onsites
If you're ready to unleash AI on LATAM's ed-fintech frontier, fire over your CV and standout projects. Let's ignite ⚡
- Department
- Engineering
- Role
- Sr. Software Engineer
- Locations
- Argentina, Chile, Colombia , Mexico, Uruguay
- Remote status
- Fully Remote
About Thaia
Boutique recruiting agency specializing in sourcing, selecting, and placing top-tier tech talent for companies across Latin America.
Already working at Thaia?
Let’s recruit together and find your next colleague.