Backend Engineer

What You'll Do

• Design & ship REST APIs: Define contracts, versioning, auth, rate limits; write migrations and docs.
• Model data & schemas: Relational (Postgres) and graph (e.g., Neo4j); enforce integrity and performance.
• Debug customer issues end-to-end: Trace with logs/metrics/traces, reproduce, fix, and write preventative guardrails.
• Optimize performance: Tune slow SQL with EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, indexes, partitioning, pagination, and caching (e.g., Redis).
• Build services in Python: Async where it helps (FastAPI/Starlette, Django/DRF, Flask), background jobs, queues, schedulers.
• Operate in the cloud: Containerize with Docker, deploy on Kubernetes (EKS), and use AWS primitives (EC2, RDS/Aurora, S3, IAM).
• Instrument everything: Custom metrics, structured logging, tracing; set SLOs and alerts (CloudWatch/Prometheus/OpenTelemetry).
• Collaborate & ship: Work with frontend and research to scope APIs and deliver features to production.

Minimum Qualifications

• 2+ years building backend systems and shipping REST APIs to production.
• Strong Python fundamentals; experience with async programming and a major web framework (FastAPI/Django/Flask).
• Solid data modeling and SQL skills; hands-on with query tuning and performance debugging in Postgres/MySQL.
• Experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j or Amazon Neptune) and appropriate data modeling trade-offs.
• Comfortable running services on AWS with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated root-cause analysis and ownership from incident to prevention.
• Clear communicator and effective collaborator with frontend, research, and customers.

Nice to Have

• GraphQL/gRPC; event-driven systems (SNS/SQS/Kafka) and background workers (Celery/RQ).
• Caching, rate limiting, multi-tenancy, and feature-flag strategies.
• Security & privacy best practices (PII handling, secrets management).
• Deep observability experience (OpenTelemetry, SLO-based alerting).
• Prior work with search/retrieval or memory systems.
• On-call experience and running blameless postmortems.