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.
About the Role
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build production AI features for Illuminate, our AI-powered decisioning and analytics platform. You'll architect systems that transform natural language into precise queries, detect anomalies in real-time data streams, and surface intelligent insights—all while operating at PubNub scale. This role requires equal depth in distributed systems, frontend development, and applied AI.
Responsibilities
- Design and build AI-powered features for the Illuminate analytics platform
- Architect natural language to query systems that translate user intent into optimized SQL
- Build React-based interfaces for AI-driven insights, anomaly detection, and query builders
- Develop low-latency pipelines processing analytical workloads across ClickHouse and Postgres
- Create and maintain prompt architectures for complex multi-step AI workflows
- Build validation and error handling systems between LLM outputs and downstream data pipelines
- Integrate with Kafka/Kafka Streams for real-time data processing and AI inference
- Collaborate on system design with product and engineering teams across timezones
About You
Mandatory Requirements
- Production AI Experience: 1+ year shipping LLM-powered applications to customers (not just prototypes)
- Systems Engineering: Strong backend fundamentals with 5+ years experience in building high-throughput, distributed systems
- Database Expertise: Strong SQL skills, particularly analytical patterns (aggregations, window functions, CTEs, query optimization)
- Frontend Skills: Solid React experience building complex, data-intensive UIs
- LLM Engineering:
- Experience with structured output extraction (function calling, JSON mode, tool use)
- Ability to design and iterate on prompt architectures for complex tasks
- Understanding of validation patterns between AI outputs and downstream systems
- Systematic approach to testing non-deterministic systems
- Tech Stack: TypeScript, Kotlin, React
- Collaboration: Works effectively async across timezones; available 7am-12pm PT overlap
- AI-Assisted Development: Regular use of Copilot, Cursor, Claude, or similar tools
- Language: Fluent English
Nice to Have
- Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Background with columnar/analytical databases (ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake)
- Kafka or Kafka Streams experience
- Query planning and optimization at the database level
- Experience building evaluation datasets and regression test suites for LLM applications
- Knowledge of RAG patterns for schema/documentation retrieval
- Exposure to semantic parsing or pre-LLM NL-to-SQL approaches
- Understanding of caching and performance optimization for LLM-based systems
- Docker/Kubernetes experience
- Cloud AI platforms (AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI)
- Prisma ORM experience
Why Join PubNub
- Build a greenfield intelligence platform at internet scale
- Ship features that land directly in customer-facing products across healthcare, fintech, gaming, and streamingAbout the Role
- High ownership and influence over technical decisions
- Remote-first setup within Poland
- Competitive B2B compensation ranging between PLN26,000 - PLN32,000 per month
- Optional office in central Katowice
If you're excited to build AI systems that make complex data accessible and actionable, we'd love to hear from you.
