Senior Backend Software Engineer, Java | Kafka - TheLoops

TheLoops, an IFS company, is the first enterprise-grade AI Agent platform built for mission-critical applications and industries. Our AI Agents act as digital coworkers that are governed, secure, always learning, and working 24/7 to drive measurable business outcomes. 

As we grow, we’re looking for driven, collaborative and ambitious individuals to help us deliver the future of AI-powered operations

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.

If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

TheLoops empowers leaders and teams to transform their work through our innovative agentic platform, driving increased efficiency and operational scale across multiple large industry segments. We’re looking for a Senior Engineer to help design and build the backbone of real-time, distributed AI platforms. You’ll work on systems that orchestrate massive data flows, reactive services, and agentic workloads—platforms that must adapt dynamically and operate reliably under heavy and unpredictable load. Collaborate across engineering teams to deliver infrastructure that is scalable, resilient, and observable by design.

If you’re passionate about high-performance computing, resilient architecture, and enabling real-time intelligence, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable, distributed platform components using Java, Kafka, Akka (Typed), gRPC, or similar technologies.
• Build and optimize data pipelines capable of handling high-throughput events with low latency and high reliability.
• Lead efforts in agentic scaling—dynamically spawning, routing, and managing intelligent agent workloads.
• Develop resilient systems that self-heal, auto-scale, and degrade gracefully under pressure.
• Define and implement metrics, tracing, and observability for end-to-end system behavior and performance.
• Collaborate closely with infrastructure, SRE, and product teams to align platform scalability with growth and reliability goals.
• Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks and propose long-term architectural improvements.
• Participate in on-call rotations, architecture reviews, and technical design sessions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building distributed systems in production.
• Strong expertise with Kafka (topics, partitions, consumers, tuning, schema registry, stream processing) or similar messaging/event systems.
• Experience building highly concurrent, event-driven, or distributed systems using frameworks like Akka or Erlang.
• Solid Java programming skills; experience with concurrency and modern Java frameworks.
• Understanding of agentic workloads and dynamic system orchestration (microservices representing intelligent agents).
• Experience designing scalable APIs, message protocols (Protobuf, Avro), and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, service mesh, container orchestration).

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with serverless or function-as-a-service scaling models.

• Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects.
• Exposure to AI/ML-driven orchestration or agentic frameworks.
• Familiarity with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Kafka monitoring, etc.

Who You Are

We are an AI company. This means you approach your work with a growth mindset and find ways to leverage AI to help make faster, smarter decisions that will 10X your impact at TheLoops.

• Passionately curious about AI: You possess a working understanding of AI fundamentals, including LLMs, embeddings, prompt engineering, and vector databases, and you're committed to staying at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field.
• A natural educator: You thrive on seeing others grasp new concepts and measure your impact by their breakthroughs in understanding.
• Technically adept: You're comfortable diving into technical documentation, from code to research papers, and can confidently discuss complex topics with both developers and executives.
• A proven builder: You have a history of successfully creating and launching educational platforms, documentation portals, training programs, or learning communities. If not, you're eager to demonstrate your capability in this area.
• Seamless cross-functional communicator: You excel at bridging communication gaps, effortlessly translating technical and business concepts between product managers, engineers, marketers, and customers.

What We’re Offering

• Salary Range:  $175,000-200,000 total comp
• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday
•  Medical, dental, & vision insurance
•  401K with Company contribution
•  Flexible spending accounts
•  Life insurance and disability benefits
•  Tuition assistance
•  Community involvement and volunteering events

M/F/Disabled/Vet VEVRAA Federal Contractor.  We are a Drug-Free Workplace. Interested candidates should apply at: www.ifs.com/about/careers-at-ifs

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. VEVRAA Federal Contractor, Equal Opportunity Employer