Senior Software Engineer, Backend Development

Who We Are

Kensho is S&P Global's hub for AI innovation and transformation. With expertise in Machine Learning and data discovery, we develop and deploy novel solutions for S&P Global and its customers worldwide. Our solutions help businesses harness the power of data and Artificial Intelligence to innovate and drive progress. Kensho's solutions and research focus on Generative AI, LLM Agents, speech recognition, entity linking, document extraction, text classification, natural language processing, and more.

About The Team:

Kensho's Applications group builds the applications, backend services, and APIs that deliver Kensho's AI capabilities to customers. Our teams are small, product-focused, and committed to shipping reliable, well-architected systems that scale. We work closely with Machine Learning, Product, and Infrastructure teams to turn advanced AI technology into high-quality, production-ready software.

The Applications group provides the core services, orchestration layers, and API frameworks that make Kensho's AI products fast, dependable, and easy to integrate. We value engineers who bring strong technical judgment, curiosity, and a commitment to building backend systems that enable robust, high-impact AI applications.

About The Role:

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design and develop reliable, secure, and performant backend systems that power Kensho's AI products. You will build APIs and orchestration layers that integrate with ML systems, support complex retrieval workflows, and deliver grounded, verifiable results to customers at scale.

You will work across backend systems that power Kensho's GenAI platform, Data Retrieval Agents, and the application architecture behind our established foundational AI toolkits like Kensho Link or NERD.

You will collaborate closely with colleagues across Product, Machine Learning, Infrastructure, Design, and other Application engineers. You will help define architecture, enforce sound engineering practices, and ensure our AI-driven applications remain robust, maintainable, and performant.

What We Are Looking For:

• 5+ years of direct experience developing customer-facing APIs within a team
• Experience developing RESTful APIs using a variety of tools
• Experience working across many stages of the software development lifecycle
• Sound reasoning about the behavior and performance of loosely-coupled systems
• Proficiency with algorithms (including time and space complexity analysis), data structures, and software architecture
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and tools to streamline deployment processes
• Experience with containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) for application deployment and orchestration
• Strong understanding of distributed system concepts, concurrency, and event-driven architectures
• Experience building and scaling high-volume, low-latency backend services
• Hands-on experience with messaging, task queues, or workflow systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Celery, or similar
• Experience deploying and operating backend systems on a major cloud platform (AWS preferred)
• Experience with observability tools and best practices, including metrics, tracing, and structured logging
• Thoughtful and efficient communication skills (both verbal and written)
• Experience turning abstract business requirements into concrete technical plans

What You'll Do:

• Build High-Quality Backend Systems: Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services and APIs that power Kensho's AI applications, ensuring they are reliable, secure, and performant
• Develop Retrieval and Orchestration Services: Create APIs and services that orchestrate data retrieval workflows, integrate with ML systems, and support grounded, verifiable outputs for GenAI (LLM based) applications
• Optimize Backend Performance: Identify and resolve latency, throughput, and scalability issues across distributed systems to ensure smooth operation under high-load and real-time retrieval scenarios
• Ensure Robust Architecture: Contribute to architectural decisions, implement clean service boundaries, and build backend foundations that support both our GenAI platform and established ML toolkits like Link and NERD
• Maintain Operational Excellence: Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and instrumentation to ensure system health, observability, and rapid issue detection
• Strengthen Security and Privacy: Apply best practices for API security, authentication, authorization, and data privacy in compliance with Kensho and S&P Global standards
• Improve System Reliability: Identify technical debt, propose practical improvements, and enhance code quality, maintainability, and fault tolerance across the stack
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with Product, Machine Learning, Infrastructure, and Design teams to align backend capabilities with user needs and product direction
• Contribute to User Experience: Build backend components that enable smooth, intuitive, and reliable user experiences in customer-facing applications
• Prototype and Experiment: Validate new ideas through prototypes, instrumentation, and data-driven experimentation to support innovation and rapid iteration

Technology You'll Encounter:

• Python, Flask, FastAPI, Django REST Framework
• PostgreSQL, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch
• AWS, Docker and other orchestration tools, Sentry, Prometheus
• Git, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Jsonnet
• Terraform, Grafana