Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

About Winston Artory Group

WAG is transforming how art and collectibles are valued, managed, and traded. Born from the merger of Winston Art Group (the largest independent appraisal and advisory firm in the U.S.) and Artory (a pioneer in art tokenization), we combine deep industry expertise with technologies like AI and blockchain to modernize a $2.9 trillion global asset class.

We’re already generating significant revenue and recently raised our Series A from top-tier VCs. Now, we’re building the next-generation platform to unlock liquidity, trust, and intelligence in the art market—and we’re looking for exceptional engineers to help us do it.

Why Join Us

• Meaningful equity and competitive compensation
• High-impact role at a growing company with revenue, funding, and a compelling vision
• Build at the intersection of art, fintech, AI, and blockchain
• A collaborative, pragmatic team that values speed, clarity, and technical quality
• Remote-flexible culture with an HQ in NYC
• Backed by top VCs and trusted by leading collectors, advisors, and institutions

About The Role

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to build and scale the core systems that power our platform—from object ingestion and valuation pipelines to AI-driven market insights and client-facing tools. You’ll be one of the earliest hires on the engineering team, with the opportunity to shape backend architecture, development culture, and technical direction.

This is an AI-native environment. We move fast using tools like Cursor and Claude Code, build with LLM APIs from OpenAI and others, and actively leverage AI in our product and development workflows. If you’re excited about shipping production software with AI as a core tool, you’ll thrive here.

What You'll Do

• Build and scale core backend systems to ingest, clean, and serve structured data at scale
• Design clean, performant APIs to power our client portal, data tools, and internal services
• Integrate and orchestrate LLM APIs (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, open-source models) for use in appraisal automation, data extraction, and insight generation
• Work with event-driven architectures and asynchronous pipelines (e.g., queues, pub/sub)
• Contribute to our CI/CD, observability, and IaC (Terraform, AWS) infrastructure
• Promote a pragmatic, high-ownership culture focused on iterative delivery and simplicity
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data specialists, and design to ensure end-to-end excellence

Qualifications

• Have a B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent with 5+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally in fast-moving, product-led environments
• Are fluent in Python, and experienced with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases
• Understand and can apply data engineering principles (ETL vs. ELT, data lakes vs. warehouses)
• Are excited about AI and have hands-on experience with LLM APIs and modern AI development workflows
• Have worked with asynchronous or event-driven systems (e.g., Celery, Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pub/Sub)
• Have built and maintained systems on AWS or other cloud platforms, with solid knowledge of Docker, Terraform, or CI/CD tooling
• Thrive in environments where you balance speed and stability, and have a bias toward clear, simple systems

Pay ranges at WAG are established based on an analysis of salaries for positions with a similar level of accountability and impact in the relevant labor market. Salary levels are expected to change to reflect an employee’s job performance (results and impact) over time. Salaries at the time of hire are typically offered in the lower to middle of the range in order to provide the opportunity to reflect performance-based increases over time.

In addition to base salaries, employees at WAG may also be eligible for equity (stock) based compensation and/or variable pay programs based on performance relative to goals and targets.

We Offer Great Benefits, Including

A Welcoming Team with Work-Life Balance

• A friendly, international, agile team that works together with cutting-edge technologies
• Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick days, and holidays
• Paid parental leave (maternity, paternity, adoption, leave)
• Paid volunteer days to encourage community involvement
• Collaborative, innovative, and inclusive company culture
• Employee recognition and appreciation programs
• Team-building activities and social events
• Transparent communication and feedback channels

Competitive Compensation

• Competitive salary based on experience and skills
• Discretionary performance-based bonuses
• Equity option grants of company shares, offering alignment with company success

Health, Wellness, And Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, and vision) with employees covered 100%
• On-site fitness center and sauna
• Generous leave policies, including bereavement and reproductive loss leave
• Opportunities for continuous learning and training
• Mentorship programs and leadership development initiatives
• 401(k)
• Life insurance and disability coverage
• Snacks in the office

The Pay Range For This Role Is

150,000 - 200,000 USD per year(US)