Staff Backend Engineer- Agent Experience (AX)

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.