Staff Backend Engineer- Agent Experience (AX)

Job description

Cloudinary is the media experience platform trusted by millions of developers and thousands of companies — from fast-growing startups to the world's largest brands — to power the images and video behind their digital experiences. Something fundamental is changing about who uses that platform. Increasingly, the "developer" calling our APIs isn't a person — it's an agent: an LLM, a coding assistant, an autonomous pipeline acting on a human's behalf. Our Agent Experience (AX) R&D team exists to make Cloudinary the default media layer those agents run on. Our guiding principle is simple: make agentic workflows work flawlessly with no friction. We're a small, fast, high-ownership team, and we're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to make Cloudinary work for agents — both by building new agent-facing infrastructure and by reshaping our existing platform for a world where the caller is a machine. Some of this is greenfield. Much of it is taking APIs, auth, and SDKs and making them ergonomic, legible, and reliable for agents. It’s a problem the whole industry is still figuring out. You’ll help define what great API design looks like when the caller is not a human developer, but an agent acting on their behalf. ### What you'll do - Build the surfaces agents call directly: API-first account provisioning, machine-to-machine authentication, scoped credentials, and agent-level identity and attribution. - Own our MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and an agent-first CLI — let coding agents and LLMs discover and invoke Cloudinary reliably, engineered for agentic callers: token-efficient tool schemas, machine-parseable output, and loud, actionable failures instead of silent ones. - Harden the agent media path — make upload and core media operations reliable for non-human callers, eliminating the ambiguity and silent-failure modes that cause agents to drop off mid-task. - Make agent behavior measurable — partner on the instrumentation, signals, and attribution that tell us whether agents are succeeding. - Work across a polyglot backend — Node.js/TypeScript for the agent tooling layer, with Ruby/Rails and Go in the core platform. - Ship, measure, iterate — prototype quickly, dogfood the experience, and represent the agent's perspective in every design decision. Work closely with Product, Ecosystem, and Discoverability across the AX team. ### About you - 10+ years building and operating production APIs, SDKs and Backend systems and at scale. - Strong in Node.js/TypeScript, and comfortable working in (or quickly ramping on) Ruby/Rails and/or Go. - Deep API and protocol design fundamentals — authentication (OAuth, API keys, scoped permissions), versioning, idempotency, rate limiting, clean contracts. - Genuine curiosity about agents and LLMs and how they're reshaping how software gets built and run. - Solid distributed-systems and cloud instincts (AWS or equivalent). - A bias for ownership in ambiguity — you scope the problem, not just the solution, and you ship. - Strong written communication — it matters more than usual when your consumers are machines and your teammates are distributed. ## Advantages - Hands-on experience with MCP, LLM tool/function-calling, or building AI-/agent-native products. - Experience building SDKs, CLIs, or developer tools that other engineers depend on. - Background in media, imaging, or video processing/delivery. - Open-source contributions in the agent or developer-tooling ecosystem.