AI Product Engineer (Backend, Node.js)

Company Overview

Smeetz operates as an AI-driven unified commerce platform tailored for the European leisure and entertainment sector. The platform services theme parks, family entertainment centers, museums, zoos, and theatres by handling ticketing, seating, food and beverage, along with payment processes.

Role Overview

This position is responsible for complete ownership of the backend components of two key AI interfaces: the Smeetz MCP server and the AI chatbot. These backend services consist of APIs, integrations, and agent logic layered on top of the core commerce platform. Time allocation is approximately 70% on backend engineering—developing, scaling, and maintaining production systems—and 30% on product involvement, including understanding customer use cases, defining development priorities, and evaluating feature effectiveness. The role reports to the VP of Engineering without direct team management responsibilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage the entire backend infrastructure of the Smeetz MCP server and AI chatbot, including associated services, tools, agent logic, and operational constraints.
• Architect and implement APIs and integrations to link AI functionalities with the Smeetz platform modules such as ticketing, bookings, and payments, ensuring security, performance, and production reliability.
• Take accountability for system reliability and efficiency by monitoring latency, error frequency, operational costs, and usage patterns, supported by comprehensive observability tools (such as Langfuse), and act decisively on findings.
• Create evaluation mechanisms to measure prompt and model changes proactively before deployment to end users.
• Participate in on-call rotations for the backend services under your responsibility.
• Collaborate with product owners and customer-facing teams to capture operational insights from venue operators, translating these into technical specifications and development priorities.
• Analyze usage data and trace logs to identify issues or gaps and suggest enhancements.
• Define and monitor success metrics for delivered features and report outcomes.
• Produce detailed documentation of owned systems to facilitate future maintenance and extend the shared Claude Code skill library.

Candidate Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience delivering production-ready software, including a minimum of 3 years focused on backend engineering building and maintaining production APIs, with Node.js and TypeScript strongly preferred.
• Strong fundamentals in backend development encompassing RESTful API design, data modeling, authentication and permissions management, queue handling and asynchronous workflows, and troubleshooting in production environments.
• Experience having launched at least one backend feature involving large language models (LLM) in production, covering tool integration, structured output handling, cost and latency optimization, and managing failure modes; prototypes or demos do not suffice.
• Ownership experience of a live production system, including participation in on-call duty.
• Daily usage proficiency of Claude Code or a comparable agentic development environment beyond basic autocomplete functionality.
• Ability to effectively communicate with non-technical stakeholders to translate their needs into technical solutions.
• Full professional proficiency in English.
• Desirable skills include experience designing APIs for agent-based tools, familiarity with MCP specifications (beyond client use), knowledge of Anthropic Claude API and tooling, experience with observability tools like Langfuse or equivalents, competence in evaluation and retrieval systems over support knowledge bases, and expertise in implementing guardrails for agents with write permissions including permission management, confirmation workflows, prompt injection prevention, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) protection.
• Experience in product-engineering collaboration environments where influence over priorities is significant.
• Additional language skills in French or German are considered an asset.

Personal Attributes

• Strong sense of ownership and responsibility for the services operated.
• A backend-first engineer with an awareness of product context and customer impact.
• Comfortable and experienced with AI-native tools, routinely leveraging Claude and agent technologies.
• A data-driven approach to defining and accepting success metrics prior to development.
• Commitment to high-quality documentation, improving shared codebase knowledge.

Benefits

• A published dual career path allowing advancement to Staff AI Product Engineer without managerial duties, with pay scales comparable to management roles.
• Complete responsibility for two integral AI product surfaces rather than side projects.
• Direct interaction with venue operators using the products developed.
• Access to state-of-the-art AI-native development tools such as Claude Code and an internal shared skill library.
• Fully remote work arrangement.
• Competitive compensation aligned with experience, with pay band confirmation upon hiring.