Senior Backend Engineer - PT/FT - NA, LATAM, Europe

Role Overview

You will be instrumental in evolving our FastAPI prototype into a robust, scalable production system. You will be the technical owner of our backend platform, influencing both architecture and engineering culture for a cutting-edge enterprise AI product. This role offers a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience in scaling async Python applications, production LLM systems, hybrid search, and building reliable infrastructure for AI models.

Responsibilities

• Lead the transition of our backend platform from prototype to a production-ready system.
• Shape the architecture and engineering culture of our enterprise AI product.
• Collaborate closely with founders experienced in AI and process automation.
• Exercise high ownership and make significant technical decisions.
• Establish engineering best practices and develop infrastructure for enterprise process knowledge.

Required Skills

• Over 5 years of experience in building backend systems, with experience transitioning prototypes to production.
• Strong expertise in Python, specifically with modern async patterns and production best practices.
• Proficiency with FastAPI or similar async web frameworks.
• Advanced PostgreSQL skills, including query optimization, indexing strategies, and production operations.
• Experience with SQLAlchemy ORM and async operations.
• Pragmatic approach to refactoring, shipping, and managing technical debt.
• Ownership mentality with end-to-end responsibility for feature development.
• Ability to navigate evolving requirements and shifting priorities in a startup environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience with distributed task queues like Celery.
• Familiarity with LLM/AI API integrations for embeddings and completions.
• Knowledge of vector databases such as pgvector or Pinecone.
• Strong testing culture, including building test frameworks and establishing coverage standards.
• Production operations experience, including on-call duties and incident response.
• Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform and deployment on AWS/GCP.
• Experience with real-time systems, such as Server-Sent Events (SSE) or WebSockets.
• Familiarity with Alembic for database migration management.