Backend Engineer

We're looking for a passionate Backend Engineer to build and scale the backend systems that power our AI platform: production-grade APIs, distributed microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native infrastructure. This role suits engineers who enjoy solving complex backend problems and taking ownership of services from design through to production. You'll work closely with ML Engineers, Platform Engineers, and DevOps to build reliable services capable of handling high-throughput AI workloads in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities:

• Production-grade REST APIs using FastAPI and/or Go.
• Distributed microservices powering AI platform workflows.
• Scalable SQL and NoSQL data models with optimised queries.
• Event-driven systems using Kafka or Pub/Sub.
• Cloud-native services deployed using Kubernetes.
• Reliable monitoring, logging, and observability pipelines.

Backend Development:

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable REST APIs using FastAPI or Go.
• Build modular, maintainable, reusable, and type-safe backend services.
• Design robust and scalable SQL and NoSQL schemas with proper indexing, constraints, and migrations.
• Optimise database queries and application performance.
• Build asynchronous workflows for long-running tasks using Kafka, Celery, Redis, or Airflow.
• Integrate backend services with storage systems such as GCS/S3 and internal platform services.
• Write clean, well-tested, readable, and production-ready code.

Distributed Systems:

• Build resilient systems with retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency, and failure recovery.
• Apply distributed systems concepts such as eventual consistency and scalability.
• Design stateless services capable of horizontal scaling.
• Implement both synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns.

Platform and Cloud:

• Implement caching strategies using Redis.
• Build services optimised for cloud-native environments.
• Work with GCP services such as GKE, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, and Pub/Sub.

Reliability and Observability:

• Implement structured logging and centralised log aggregation.
• Instrument services using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry.
• Improve system reliability through health checks, readiness probes, graceful shutdowns, and fault tolerance.
• Participate in production debugging, incident response, and performance optimisation.

Requirements:

• 2+ years of professional backend development experience.
• Strong Python (FastAPI) and/or Go programming skills.
• Solid understanding of REST API design and backend architecture.
• Experience with asynchronous programming (async/await, background workers, concurrency).
• Experience with PostgreSQL, query optimisation, and database design.
• Experience with Redis for caching, task queues, sessions, or rate limiting.
• Familiarity with SQL, NoSQL, graph databases, and vector databases.
• Good understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with Kafka or Google Pub/Sub.

Cloud and DevOps:

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with Docker (preferred).
• Experience deploying applications on Kubernetes (GKE preferred).
• Understanding of rolling deployments, rollbacks, secrets management, and configuration management.

Software Engineering and Ways of Working:

• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Good understanding of software design principles and system design fundamentals.
• Experience writing unit and integration tests.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to take ownership from design to production and work independently in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Pragmatic engineering judgment, with long-term maintainability, observability, and reliability in mind.

Good to Have / Bonus Points:

• Experience with gRPC and WebSockets.
• Experience with GraphQL.
• Experience with Airflow or other workflow orchestration tools.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or Loki.