Backend Infrastructure Engineer Jobs in California
Backend Infrastructure Engineer jobs in California are among the most active in the country, with strong demand from enterprise software companies, cloud platform providers, and large-scale fintech and media firms at every level from junior engineer through principal and staff. The heaviest hiring concentrates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where employers like Google, Meta, and Qualcomm maintain deep engineering organizations. The most sought-after specialties are Kubernetes orchestration, distributed systems reliability, and cloud-native infrastructure on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 18+ Backend Infrastructure Engineer jobs
About Airbyte:
We’re on a mission to make data available and actionable to everyone, everywhere. With 700+ connectors, our platform powers analytics and gives AI agents the business context they need to do real work. More than 25,000 companies, including 20% of the Fortune 500, rely on Airbyte to put their data to work.
We’re built on open source because we believe companies should have full control over their data. A community of 27K members helps shape what we build, and we’re backed by $181M from investors including Benchmark, Accel, Altimeter, Coatue, and Y Combinator.
Models keep getting better. What holds AI back is the data informing and shaping its decisions, and that's the layer we're building.
We’re just getting started. If you’re excited by big challenges, meaningful ownership, and the chance to help build what’s next, we’d love to meet you.
The Role
Airbyte is incubating new product opportunities at the intersection of data, AI, and developer infrastructure. Our small team builds tooling and infrastructure for data practitioners and software engineers, leveraging Airbyte's foundation in enterprise connectivity.
This is not an ML research or prompt engineering role. We're looking for an experienced backend or platform engineer who has built complex production systems and has also worked hands-on with AI applications or infrastructure. You'll own technical explorations, build prototypes, and take promising ideas through to production.
We're still early. Some of our work extends existing products, while other projects begin as hypotheses that need validation. There's significant room to influence technical direction, challenge assumptions, and help shape what we build next.
What You'll Work On
Airbyte MCP: Build infrastructure that lets AI agents configure Airbyte, troubleshoot syncs, and access data directly from connected sources and warehouses. Design reliable, secure, and observable interfaces across the connector ecosystem.
Semantic Search & Retrieval: Build and operate search infrastructure for high-quality retrieval over enterprise data. Improve relevance, latency, and reliability in production.
Semantic Models: Develop systems for defining and maintaining semantic models over enterprise data. Help AI applications use consistent business definitions and produce answers that can be verified against underlying data.
SaaS Sandbox: Build realistic, stateful replicas of SaaS systems for developing and testing agents. Reproduce API behavior, failures, and state changes so workflows can be evaluated without using production accounts.
What You'll Do
Explore New Product Opportunities
Turn product hypotheses into focused technical experiments. Build prototypes that test feasibility and expose important constraints.
Work directly with customers, Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to understand real-world problems and incorporate feedback into technical decisions.
Evaluate competing technical approaches and use what you learn to influence product direction.
Build Production-Grade Infrastructure
Design and implement backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure for AI, data, and developer products.
Build reliable, observable systems with clear failure handling, debugging, and operational safeguards.
Take promising prototypes into production and improve them based on usage, incidents, and customer feedback.
Lead Technical Direction
Own architecture and execution across technical design, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
Lead technical decisions that span teams. Align interfaces and dependencies, and influence architecture beyond your immediate projects.
Communicate priorities, risks, and tradeoffs clearly, and follow through on commitments.
What You'll Need
You may be a strong fit if you are fundamentally a backend or platform engineer who has shipped AI-powered products.
10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing distributed systems.
Experience building complex systems involving APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries, or distributed execution.
Hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, MCP, or similar technologies.
Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
Strong system design skills and the ability to reason about reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams and influence architectural and engineering decisions.
Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing engineering quality.
Strong product instincts and comfort operating in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
Exceptional written communication skills.
A strong bias toward ownership and shipping.
Nice to Have
Experience building and operating AI agents in production, including debugging, observability, and evaluation.
Experience building agent infrastructure, agent platforms, or evaluation systems.
Experience with retrieval systems, vector search, search infrastructure, or semantic models.
Experience building developer tools, platform infrastructure, or integrations with third-party SaaS APIs.
Experience with data infrastructure such as Kafka, Iceberg, Postgres, Spark, or modern data warehouses.
What Success Looks Like
Success is not measured by the number of prototypes we build. It is measured by whether we turn promising ideas into products customers use and infrastructure they can depend on.
You'll help us:
Take new ideas from prototype to production and improve them through customer feedback and real-world usage.
Build reliable, observable systems that are easier to operate, debug, and improve over time.
Use technical experiments and engineering judgment to make better product and architecture decisions.
Lead technical decisions that make systems simpler, more reliable, and easier for other teams to build on.
Location
San Francisco, CA — onsite 4 days/week
Why You'll Love Working at Airbyte:
At Airbyte, we believe great work happens when people feel supported, trusted, and empowered to grow. Our market-leading Total Rewards package is designed to help you thrive professionally and personally. Our benefits and perks include:
- Flexible PTO with a culture that encourages at least 25 days off annually
- 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for all parents
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Professional development budget, conference sponsorship, and book reimbursement
- Commuter benefits and monthly internet reimbursement
- Breakfast and lunch in our San Francisco office
- A collaborative, in-person culture focused on learning, growth, and impact
If you find this role exciting, we encourage you to apply even if you think you don’t meet all of the requirements!
We are not accepting agency submissions or recruiting firm support for this role. Unsolicited resumes will not be considered.
Airbyte is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, familial status, domestic violence victim status, veteran or military status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state or local laws. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Airbyte is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodations due to a disability.
Compensation Range: $250K - $280K
About Airbyte:
We’re on a mission to make data available and actionable to everyone, everywhere. With 700+ connectors, our platform powers analytics and gives AI agents the business context they need to do real work. More than 25,000 companies, including 20% of the Fortune 500, rely on Airbyte to put their data to work.
We’re built on open source because we believe companies should have full control over their data. A community of 27K members helps shape what we build, and we’re backed by $181M from investors including Benchmark, Accel, Altimeter, Coatue, and Y Combinator.
Models keep getting better. What holds AI back is the data informing and shaping its decisions, and that's the layer we're building.
We’re just getting started. If you’re excited by big challenges, meaningful ownership, and the chance to help build what’s next, we’d love to meet you.
The Role
Airbyte is incubating new product opportunities at the intersection of data, AI, and developer infrastructure. Our small team builds tooling and infrastructure for data practitioners and software engineers, leveraging Airbyte's foundation in enterprise connectivity.
This is not an ML research or prompt engineering role. We're looking for an experienced backend or platform engineer who has built complex production systems and has also worked hands-on with AI applications or infrastructure. You'll own technical explorations, build prototypes, and take promising ideas through to production.
We're still early. Some of our work extends existing products, while other projects begin as hypotheses that need validation. There's significant room to influence technical direction, challenge assumptions, and help shape what we build next.
What You'll Work On
Airbyte MCP: Build infrastructure that lets AI agents configure Airbyte, troubleshoot syncs, and access data directly from connected sources and warehouses. Design reliable, secure, and observable interfaces across the connector ecosystem.
Semantic Search & Retrieval: Build and operate search infrastructure for high-quality retrieval over enterprise data. Improve relevance, latency, and reliability in production.
Semantic Models: Develop systems for defining and maintaining semantic models over enterprise data. Help AI applications use consistent business definitions and produce answers that can be verified against underlying data.
SaaS Sandbox: Build realistic, stateful replicas of SaaS systems for developing and testing agents. Reproduce API behavior, failures, and state changes so workflows can be evaluated without using production accounts.
What You'll Do
Explore New Product Opportunities
Turn product hypotheses into focused technical experiments. Build prototypes that test feasibility and expose important constraints.
Work directly with customers, Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to understand real-world problems and incorporate feedback into technical decisions.
Evaluate competing technical approaches and use what you learn to influence product direction.
Build Production-Grade Infrastructure
Design and implement backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure for AI, data, and developer products.
Build reliable, observable systems with clear failure handling, debugging, and operational safeguards.
Take promising prototypes into production and improve them based on usage, incidents, and customer feedback.
Lead Technical Direction
Own architecture and execution across technical design, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
Lead technical decisions that span teams. Align interfaces and dependencies, and influence architecture beyond your immediate projects.
Communicate priorities, risks, and tradeoffs clearly, and follow through on commitments.
What You'll Need
You may be a strong fit if you are fundamentally a backend or platform engineer who has shipped AI-powered products.
10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing distributed systems.
Experience building complex systems involving APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries, or distributed execution.
Hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, MCP, or similar technologies.
Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
Strong system design skills and the ability to reason about reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams and influence architectural and engineering decisions.
Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing engineering quality.
Strong product instincts and comfort operating in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
Exceptional written communication skills.
A strong bias toward ownership and shipping.
Nice to Have
Experience building and operating AI agents in production, including debugging, observability, and evaluation.
Experience building agent infrastructure, agent platforms, or evaluation systems.
Experience with retrieval systems, vector search, search infrastructure, or semantic models.
Experience building developer tools, platform infrastructure, or integrations with third-party SaaS APIs.
Experience with data infrastructure such as Kafka, Iceberg, Postgres, Spark, or modern data warehouses.
What Success Looks Like
Success is not measured by the number of prototypes we build. It is measured by whether we turn promising ideas into products customers use and infrastructure they can depend on.
You'll help us:
Take new ideas from prototype to production and improve them through customer feedback and real-world usage.
Build reliable, observable systems that are easier to operate, debug, and improve over time.
Use technical experiments and engineering judgment to make better product and architecture decisions.
Lead technical decisions that make systems simpler, more reliable, and easier for other teams to build on.
Location
San Francisco, CA — onsite 4 days/week
Why You'll Love Working at Airbyte:
At Airbyte, we believe great work happens when people feel supported, trusted, and empowered to grow. Our market-leading Total Rewards package is designed to help you thrive professionally and personally. Our benefits and perks include:
- Flexible PTO with a culture that encourages at least 25 days off annually
- 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for all parents
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Professional development budget, conference sponsorship, and book reimbursement
- Commuter benefits and monthly internet reimbursement
- Breakfast and lunch in our San Francisco office
- A collaborative, in-person culture focused on learning, growth, and impact
If you find this role exciting, we encourage you to apply even if you think you don’t meet all of the requirements!
We are not accepting agency submissions or recruiting firm support for this role. Unsolicited resumes will not be considered.
Airbyte is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, familial status, domestic violence victim status, veteran or military status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state or local laws. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Airbyte is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodations due to a disability.
Compensation Range: $250K - $280K
See All 18 Backend Infrastructure Engineer Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find JobsBackend Infrastructure Engineer Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Backend Infrastructure Engineer Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
Top Industries Hiring
- Consulting & Professional Services
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in backend infrastructure engineer jobs across California.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related field
- Proficiency in at least one infrastructure language such as Go, Python, or Rust
- Hands-on experience designing and operating Kubernetes clusters at production scale
- Demonstrated expertise with cloud platforms including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure
- Experience building CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi
- Familiarity with observability stacks including Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry
Backend Infrastructure Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a backend infrastructure engineer in California?
Backend infrastructure engineering has no state-issued license in California, so the path centers on education and demonstrated technical skill. Most California employers expect a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related discipline from a four-year university or an accredited program. Candidates who lack a traditional degree often enter through bootcamp certificates, associate programs at California community colleges, or by building a public portfolio of infrastructure projects on platforms like GitHub that hiring teams can review directly.
How much do backend infrastructure engineers make in California?
Backend infrastructure engineers in California earn a median of about $174,410 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $105,060 for the lowest 10% to over $272,670 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire backend infrastructure engineers in California?
Employers hiring backend infrastructure engineers in California right now include Engramme, ByteDance, and Esri, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. California's dense concentration of cloud computing, enterprise SaaS, and semiconductor firms means infrastructure engineering talent is in demand across a wide range of company sizes and industries.
Which California cities have the most backend infrastructure engineer jobs?
San Francisco, San Jose, and Fremont account for the most backend infrastructure engineer openings in California. The Bay Area leads because it is home to the headquarters of major cloud and platform companies, while Los Angeles has grown steadily as streaming, fintech, and enterprise software firms scale their engineering organizations, and San Diego draws significant demand from defense technology and semiconductor companies.
Are there remote backend infrastructure engineer jobs in California?
Yes, and more than most fields. Backend infrastructure engineering is predominantly a desk and systems role, making it well suited to remote work. About 25% of backend infrastructure engineer openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting how broadly distributed infrastructure teams have become. Roles focused on cloud operations, platform reliability, and infrastructure automation tend to be the most consistently remote.
How can I get hired as a backend infrastructure engineer in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is a junior site reliability engineer or DevOps associate role, where many California-based employers such as large cloud companies and enterprise software firms in the Bay Area run structured new-grad programs that build infrastructure skills on the job. Moving laterally from a software development or IT systems administration position is another common door. Building a public portfolio of Terraform modules, Kubernetes configurations, or CI/CD pipelines gives candidates without a long resume a concrete, reviewable advantage in California hiring processes.
Where can I find and apply to backend infrastructure engineer jobs in California?
You can find and apply to backend infrastructure engineer jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings updated regularly. Search the available roles, find the ones that fit your experience and location, and apply directly to each position.
See All 18 Backend Infrastructure Engineer Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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