Senior Backend Engineer (Python / FastAPI / AI Systems)

Experience
7+ years of backend engineering experience

About the Role
We’re a rapidly growing startup building data- and AI-driven systems at scale. We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who thrives on ownership — someone who designs systems, ships them to production, and takes responsibility for their reliability, performance, and long-term quality.
You’ll own core backend services and data pipelines that handle high-volume structured and unstructured data, power AI workflows, and serve LLMs in production. This is a hands-on role with real impact and minimal process overhead.

What You’ll Do
• Own and build core backend services with modularity using Python and FastAPI
• Design and maintain production-grade APIs for data ingestion, processing, and model inference • Build systems that handle high-volume structured and unstructured data (text, documents, embeddings, events)
 • Design and operate AI data pipelines that support ingestion, transformation, and serving
 • Support hosting, scaling, and serving LLMs and other ML models in production
 • Design and optimize PostgreSQL schemas and queries for performance and reliability
 • Build asynchronous and event-driven systems using RabbitMQ
 • Make pragmatic architecture decisions with a focus on simplicity, correctness, and scalability
 • Ensure systems are observable, fault-tolerant, and easy to operate
 • Take responsibility for production issues, debugging, and continuous improvement
 • Set a high bar for code quality, testing, and maintainability
 • Collaborate closely with product, frontend, and ML teams

What We’re Looking For
Core Backend & Systems
• 7+ years of backend engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Python, including async programming
• Extensive experience with FastAPI or similar modern frameworks
• Strong fundamentals in API design, authentication, and security
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL (schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations, concurrency)
• Hands-on experience with RabbitMQ or similar systems (queue design, retries, backpressure, failure handling)

Preferred Data & AI Experience
• Experience handling large-scale structured and unstructured data
• Experience building or supporting AI/ML data pipelines
• Exposure to LLM inference systems (self-hosted or managed)
• Ability to design backend systems that evolve as models and data change

Deployment & Reliability
• Strong experience with Docker and containerized deployments • Familiarity with CI/CD and automated releases
• Strong focus on reliability, observability, and operational quality

Nice to Have
• Kubernetes or container orchestration experience
• Experience running compute-intensive or GPU-backed services • Experience with vector databases or search systems