Senior Backend AI Engineer
Viaplay Group · Stockholm, Sweden · hybrid
At Viaplay Group, we entertain millions of people every day through our streaming services, radio networks, and TV channels. We believe in the power of content not just as a way of telling stories and touching lives, but also expanding worlds.
We’re looking for the best people to join us on our journey.
Right now, we’re looking for a Senior Backend AI Engineer to join our AI Lab in Stockholm and help explore how small, multidisciplinary teams can build useful products with AI.
The role You’ll work closely with product, design and engineering colleagues, turning opportunities into working products and validating them with users.
AI will be a core part of how you build and deliver, from exploration through development, testing and validation. You’ll help improve these ways of working and share what you learn with the wider organisation. You’ll also integrate AI driven capabilities into products where they address a real user need.
Backend engineering will be your strongest area. You’ll design services, connect systems and make software reliable in production. You’ll be expected to contribute beyond your specialism: like helping shape an interaction, building a prototype, contributing to frontend development or testing a hypothesis with users.
That breadth is central to how the team works. We’re exploring how far a small team can go when people combine depth in their own craft with practical contributions across disciplines. You’ll bring your engineering judgement into product and design discussions and learn from colleagues as you take shared responsibility for the result.
The team starts with a lab approach: focused scope, short feedback loops and room to experiment. As we learn what works, the aim is to evolve into an established structure with ongoing product responsibilities. You’ll help shape that journey and take care of the products as they develop.
What your day might look like- Turn agreed product scope into working products
- Design, build and maintain backend services, APIs and integrations.
- Contribute beyond backend through frontend development, prototyping, product exploration or validation with users.
- Apply and improve advanced AI-assisted workflows across development, testing and validation.
- Integrate AI driven capabilities where they add value to the product.
- Work with product and design to use data, user insights and hypotheses to guide implementation and evaluate outcomes.
- Improve security, performance, reliability and maintainability as products develop.
- Contribute to deployment, monitoring, maintenance and operation, taking responsibility for the software you deliver.
- Share knowledge and help colleagues move work forward across role boundaries.
What we’re looking for We understand you may feel confident ticking certain boxes more than others and that’s why we always keep an open mind in our recruitment process. But, in order to thrive in this role, we do believe you’ll have at least some experience in the following:
You’ve used AI across substantial parts of product delivery, beyond individual coding generation. You can explain your contribution, how you verified the result and what you learned.
- Technical depth: Strong backend engineering expertise in Rust, Node.js/TypeScript, with a willingness to work across languages as the product requires. You bring experience in service and data design, APIs and integrations, and can make architecture trade-offs and deliver reliable, secure software using automated testing, debugging and production observability.
- Practical breadth: Experience contributing beyond backend engineering, combined with curiosity and a willingness to develop further across disciplines. You can show how you’ve helped move a product forward through frontend development, prototyping, design exploration, testing and validation with users.
- AI-native delivery: Experience using advanced workflows, such as agent-based or specification-driven development. You can structure work for AI, provide context, evaluate the resulting software and take accountability for what reaches production.
- Product experience: Experience in a product organisation and a cross-functional team with product managers and designers. You use data and user insights to test hypotheses, validate value and take shared responsibility for outcomes after release.
It’s a bonus if you have- Experience building ontologies, knowledge bases or “company brains” for shared context.
- Experience building agentic platforms or AI-powered software factories.
- Experience developing domain-specific agent harnesses with tools, context and evaluations.
- Experience with AWS and distributed, event-driven or serverless systems.
- Experience with automated delivery pipelines and infrastructure as code.
- Practical frontend experience, mobile development or other complementary technologies.
- Experience with experimentation tooling and improving user experience through measurable outcomes.
- Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into products and using user feedback to improve them.
You bring approaches we can learn from and can demonstrate where AI has improved your delivery, as well as where it has required more care. You are comfortable challenging existing practices and helping the team test better ones.
We value curiosity, ownership and colleagues who are generous with their knowledge and help others succeed.
What’s in it for youAn opportunity to help shape how Viaplay builds products with AI. You’ll bring backend depth, work across disciplines and see how your contribution influences both the products we deliver and the way the team develops.
You’ll join at a stage where there is room to experiment and help establish process and practices that can benefit the wider organisation.
What we offer you- We’ve got you covered! 30 days of paid vacation every year, an attractive pension and insurance scheme, and generous parental leave pay lift.
- Your wellbeing matters. We provide you with various wellbeing initiatives including wellness allowance.
- Flexibility that works. We follow a hybrid model with at least three days a week in the office, giving you the best mix of collaboration and focus time.
- A safe space to grow and up-skill. Our learning culture puts you in the driver’s seat of your own development.
- An innovative environment with Hack Days once a year. This week-long initiative allows you to think outside the box and deliver creative, technical solutions that (more often than not) go on to be implemented, either in our product or our ways of working.
- Entertainment is what we love, and entertainment is what we do. So, unlimited access to Viaplay seems only fair for you to get to know the product – including serier & viewing events, new release movie rentals, linear channels and more.
Hit play today If this feels like your kind of challenge, make sure you apply by attaching your CV here – you may also want to add your LinkedIn profile. Please don’t send us your application via email because we won’t be able to accept it. We do, however, welcome any questions you may have about this particular position.
Want to learn more about who we are and what we do? Check out our careers page or follow us on Instagram! We’re only ever a few clicks away.