Senior Software Engineer - Applied AI Platform

About PubNub

PubNub powers the world’s most engaging real-time experiences—chat, live updates, and interactive applications—for over 2,000 companies including Verizon, Autodesk, Zillow, and Dropbox. Our global data network processes trillions of messages each month with sub-100 ms latency across 15+ data centers. Backed by $130M in funding, we’re shaping the future of how the world connects.

We’re building an AI capability layer that helps developers add AI features to real-time streams—things like classification, summarization, routing, enrichment, and automation—without breaking latency, reliability, or trust.

What you’ll build

You’ll build production AI services and platform tooling that make it easy (and safe) for product teams to ship AI features on top of PubNub’s real-time data. This is a systems plus platform engineering role with applied AI, focused on shipping and operating real features at high scale.

What this role is (and isn’t) - Role Responsibilities

• Build and operate AI-powered services integrated into PubNub’s platform (reliability, latency, cost, and quality)
• Design low-latency inference pipelines that process high-throughput message streams, like moderation
• Implement model selection / routing, prompt + retrieval patterns, caching, batching, and fallbacks
• Build evaluation and observability: quality metrics, tracing, drift monitoring, and incident/debug workflows
• Build internal frameworks, APIs/SDKs, and tooling so other teams can ship AI features safely and consistently
• Partner with product and engineering teams on trade-offs (latency vs quality, cost vs accuracy, privacy/security constraints)
• Contribute to a great developer experience: clean interfaces, SDK support, and clear documentation

This role is not:

• A research role developing new foundation models or novel training algorithms from scratch
• Primarily focused on deep model architecture work (though you may occasionally fine-tune or adapt models when it makes product sense)

Requirements

• Minimum 5 years experience in writing backend/platform applications
• Fluency in one of the programming languages: TypeScript, Python, Rust together with strong desire to learn remaining ecosystems
• 1+ years of experience shipping AI-enabled features in production (building and shipping AI-powered customer features)
• Experience integrating with managed or self-hosted LLM inference (e.g., OpenAI/Azure/AWS Bedrock or OSS models)
• Experience building and operating high-throughput services (streaming, queues, real-time APIs)
• Strong software design skills with deep knowledge of architecture and design patterns (performance, reliability, observability)
• Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.)
• Fluent English

Nice to Have

• Experience with real-time and streaming systems: WebSockets, Kafka, Kinesis, pub/sub, event-driven architectures
• Containerization: Kubernetes/Docker/infra-as-code experience
• Model serving and performance tooling: vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, TorchServe and more
• Vector databases: search / retrieval systems and embeddings
• Experience with safety/guardrails, PII handling, and compliance requirements in production AI

Why This Is Fun

• You’ll ship AI features that work in real time
• You’ll solve hard constraints: latency, scale, cost, and trust
• You’ll build platform primitives that multiple product teams rely on
• You’ll work on greenfield systems with real customer impact across industries

Why Join PubNub

• Remote-first setup within Poland with an option to work from our brand new office in central Katowice
• Competitive B2B compensation ranging between PLN26,000 - PLN32,000 per month

If you’re excited to make AI real-time, we’d love to hear from you.