AI Backend Engineer (m/w/d)

Role summary

This position is ideal for a mid-level software engineer specializing in cloud-native backend development to join the exocad Machine Learning team as a Backend Engineer, owning the production services that put ML models in front of users. Working closely with ML researchers, frontend engineers, and product teams across sites, you'll extend and operate the model serving layer behind exocad's dental CAD workflows: inference APIs, deployment and rollout automation, versioning, monitoring, and the performance and cost tuning that keeps them healthy under real workloads. You'll also contribute to the upstream training and labeling infrastructure that feeds them. This role focuses on the engineering that turns research prototypes into reliable, observable, traceable production systems, and on the operational discipline that keeps model behavior predictable release over release.

Department:

Research & Development

Location:

EMEA-Germany-exocad

Description

This position is ideal for a mid-level software engineer specializing in cloud-native backend development to join the exocad Machine Learning team as a Backend Engineer, owning the production services that put ML models in front of users. Working closely with ML researchers, frontend engineers, and product teams across sites, you'll extend and operate the model serving layer behind exocad's dental CAD workflows: inference APIs, deployment and rollout automation, versioning, monitoring, and the performance and cost tuning that keeps them healthy under real workloads. You'll also contribute to the upstream training and labeling infrastructure that feeds them. This role focuses on the engineering that turns research prototypes into reliable, observable, traceable production systems, and on the operational discipline that keeps model behavior predictable release over release.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain, extend, and operate the production services that serve exocad’s ML models as part of the exocad AI Design product.
• Own model deployment end to end: containerized builds, versioning, staged rollout, rollback, and reproducible release artifacts.
• Automate provisioning and deployment with Terraform and AWS-native tooling so environments stay consistent and releases repeatable.
• Build monitoring into serving systems for latency, throughput, resource utilization, and error rates, and act on what the telemetry shows.
• Collaborate with engineering, and product teams to deliver compliant and business-aligned cloud and data solutions.
• Own deployments in both our AWS global and AWS China environments, partnering with our regional experts on data residency requirements.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or similar education.
• Experience: 4+ years in backend engineering, including 2+ years of hands‑on experience designing and operating systems on AWS.
• Skills: Strong proficiency in Python, and C#; solid grounding in systems design and distributed systems; solid understanding of AWS services (SageMaker, EC2, Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, RDS); experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and CI/CD automation (Jenkins); hands‑on experience with Docker and containerized services.
• Communication: Ability to clearly document and explain technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Teamwork: Proven ability to collaborate effectively across global, cross-functional teams.
• Product Mindset: Ability to understand what our customers really need and build accordingly.

Complementary skills

• General understanding of machine learning concepts, training and evaluation workflows.
• Experience with GitHub Actions.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, or Prometheus.

Job Benefits

• Exciting and varied tasks in a dynamic and growing software company
• Flat hierarchies and fast decision-making
• A positive working environment that values both freedom and responsibility
• Strong team spirit and a very pleasant atmosphere
• Modern offices, workstations and the latest technologies
• Flexible working hours
• Training and development opportunities
• Company events
• Sports activities and work-life balance initiatives
• Free drinks, fruit and snacks
• Canteen with in-house cook
• Good transport connections
• JobTicket / JobRad

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Equal Opportunity Statement

Align Technology is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities in all our practices, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, marital status, protected veteran status, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other legally protected category. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the country for which they are applying, and employment eligibility will be verified as a condition of hire.