Artificial intelligence is transforming society. AI Sweden is the national center for applied artificial intelligence and our mission is to accelerate the use of AI for the benefit of our society, our competitiveness, and for everyone living in Sweden. We drive impactful initiatives in areas such as healthcare, energy, and the public sector while pushing the boundaries of AI research and innovation in fields such as natural language processing and edge learning. Join us in harnessing the untapped value of AI to drive innovation and create sustainable value for Sweden.

We are now expanding our team and looking for an experienced, curious, and solution-oriented Backend Developer to help us build the next generation of AI-powered digital assistants.

About the role

We are developing Svea -a shared digital assistant for the Swedish public sector. The initiative brings together technology, law, data and AI adoption to create a common, reliable, and secure AI solution for thousands of users across Sweden.

The project is now entering a major scale-up phase. As a Backend Developer, you will play a key role in taking Svea from prototype to a full-featured product. You’ll design intuitive user interfaces, integrate real-time interactions with powerful LLMs, and work closely with a small cross-functional team of developers and data scientists.

Your work will directly influence how Sweden’s public sector adopts and uses generative AI.

Your main responsibilities

• Design and develop backend solutions that power AI-driven workflows and product features

• Build and maintain robust APIs and services that support real-time and data-intensive experiences

• Collaborate closely with frontend developers, designers and data scientists to deliver end-to-end functionality

• Implement and optimize real-time backend features (WebSockets, events, queues, streaming-like flows)

• Work with SQL databases and improve data models, queries and performance

• Ensure backend quality through testing, monitoring, and good engineering practices

• Explore and evaluate new technologies and approaches to improve reliability, performance and developer experience

What you bring (Must Have)

• 4+ years of experience as a backend or full-stack developer building modern web applications

• A strong engineering mindset: you care about building reliable systems, writing maintainable code, and improving how things work - and you’re comfortable jumping into a PHP/Laravel codebase, even if you haven’t worked with that exact stack before

• Curiosity and drive: you enjoy learning, experimenting, and aren’t afraid to step outside your comfort zone

Nice to have

• Experience with PHP and Laravel

• Good knowledge of SQL & relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL)

• Experience building and consuming REST APIs

• Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Laravel Echo, Socket.io, Pusher or similar)

• Performance optimization skills (caching, indexing, query optimisation)

• Testing experience (PHPUnit/Pest)

• Experience working with queues/events, background jobs, and async workflows

Bonus points

• Experience with monitoring/logging tools (Sentry, Grafana, Prometheus)

• Experience with event tracking and analytics for product insights

• Experience building AI-powered applications, RAG setups, or other data-intensive systems

• Experience designing scalable architectures and improving system reliability

Who you are

You’re someone who enjoys autonomy, takes initiative, and thrives in fast-paced, impact-oriented environments. You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you believe in the potential of AI to improve society and you want to contribute to that transformation.

At AI Sweden, you’ll work alongside developers, linguists, policy specialists, journalists, historians, entrepreneurs, and leading AI researchers. We value diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and we believe they are essential to solving complex societal challenges.

Why work for AI Sweden?

To us, artificial intelligence is not only about tech, it’s a force for positive societal change. You'll be working alongside leading AI experts, scientists, journalists, linguists, policy professionals, entrepreneurs, change leaders, and many more. To work here, you don’t need to know “everything” about AI, but you need to believe in its potential to help shape our society for the better.

As an organization, we’re uniquely positioned at the sweet spot of governmental influence and startup agility. Small enough to stay adaptive and have fun but backed by and in close contact with both the government, academia and private and public sector.

Join us to make a real-world impact by contributing to initiatives that benefit society and tackle critical challenges. Be at the forefront of AI innovation, working with cutting-edge technologies and playing a key role in shaping the future of AI in Sweden.

And, within our mission, we can most certainly be a platform empowering you to realize your ideas. AI Sweden’s ability to empower partners and individual team members to do exceedingly well in their profession is a key success factor for driving positive and significant impact.

Naturally, we’re under a collective agreement (“kollektivavtal”) and offer everything that comes with it in terms of annual leave, pensions, wellness allowance (“friskvårdsbidrag”), and such.

In short, we like to believe we offer our team members a place to grow, an environment for personal development. 

An equal and fair working environment

We strongly believe in diversity and inclusion and are acutely aware of the skewed gender balance in our industry. We actively strive to put together a diverse team in terms of age, gender and background.

At AI Sweden, we are committed to building diverse and inclusive teams. Some positions may be subject to export control regulations, which means that specific requirements may apply depending on the role. If relevant, we will inform you clearly during the recruitment process.

Application Deadline: 2026-02-15

If you have any questions or thoughts, don’t hesitate to contact Lucas Ambjörn, AI Transformation Strategist.

AI Sweden does not accept unsolicited support and kindly ask not to be contacted by any advertisement agents, recruitment agencies or manning companies.