Staff Python Engineer

Staff Python Engineer

Remote — CET/CEST timezone | Backend

Hi 👋 I'm Nike, Sr. Engineering Manager in Arch Systems. How do you feel about owning one of the most complex parts of our product, hunting down problems worth solving instead of waiting for them to land in your queue, and being the engineer Product comes to for ETAs — including when the honest answer means choosing between a quick path now and the proper long-term one? And doing all of this with AI agents pushed to their full power, while owning every line that ships under your name. If that sounds exciting (even if a little scary), read on — I'm looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help us build the backend that leading manufacturers bet their operations on.

You'll be joining a team of 13 — backend, frontend, a QA engineer, and me. A few people you'd be working with closely: Alexis leads our cloud backend and is the person who can tell you why every system is the way it is. Dejan and Clement work across the gnarliest parts of the Python codebase and bring sharp product instincts — neither is afraid to push back on a spec when something feels off. The rest of the team is just as strong — you'll meet them quickly. We run flat: engineers talk to Product directly, push back on specs, help shape them, and own the execution timelines they commit to. There's no PM-to-EM-to-IC telephone game. If you need a decision from Product, you go get it. If a spec is wrong, you say so — and you bring the better version.

Here's what I expect from you: take a problem and drive it to completion. No hand-holding, no waiting for a ticket to land in your queue, no "I'm blocked" without already working on plan B. I won't micromanage you, and in return you own what you ship — including the parts that aren't fun. That said, this isn't a lone-wolf gig. Helping others is non-negotiable: reviewing PRs, unblocking a teammate, explaining why a system works the way it does. We move faster as a team than as a collection of strong individuals. And we love shipping. The business grows when features land in production, not when branches age gracefully on GitHub. The quality bar stays high, though — every change goes through code review, and we don't ship sloppy code. The engineers who thrive here are passionate about all three sides of this: writing strong technical work, shipping it, and automating the tools and processes around it so the next thing ships faster.

Why You Should or Shouldn't Apply

Staff engineering means different things at different companies. Here's what it means here, so you can decide if it fits:

• You love shipping features that real users touch. Code that ships and gets used beats clever code that doesn't, every time.
• You enjoy defining the spec with Product, not waiting for it. "Tell me exactly what to build and I'll spend a month building it" isn't this job. You ask hard questions, push back when something doesn't make sense, and help shape what gets built before a single line is written.
• You're comfortable with shifting priorities, daily async Slack standups, and the occasional "actually, can we look at X first?" mid-week. We don't run classic sprints — work flows continuously, and you adapt with it.
• You hold a high code quality bar without confusing it for perfection. You know the difference between code that's ready to ship and code that's been polished for a week because you couldn't stop tweaking it.
• You're a strong communicator who doesn't mind meetings. Not back-to-back-calendar-tetris meetings, but enough of them that if you hate talking to people, this will not be fun for you.
• You thrive in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment. Work comes primarily from Product, but how it gets done — the design, the trade-offs, the timeline — is on you. You drive it forward and ask for help when you need it.

Put another way, you shouldn't apply if:

• You don't enjoy communicating, or you don't find time to stay current on technology.
• You're looking to transition out of hands-on engineering. This is an IC role.
• You want to be the lone star on the team and don't care what your teammates think. Strong opinions are welcome; ignoring the room is not.
• You want a team of juniors and mid-levels to mentor. You'll be working alongside experienced engineers who'll push back on you as much as you push back on them.

About the Role

Arch Systems is building the future of manufacturing intelligence. Our ArchFX Cloud platform processes millions of IoT data points daily from advanced factory machines worldwide, helping leading manufacturers optimize efficiency, sustainability, and growth.

We are seeking an experienced Staff Python Engineer as an independent contractor focused on backend engineering and distributed systems. This is a senior individual contributor role; it is not a frontend or management position. You will work on high-scale data systems that power real-time factory insights, drive customer-facing KPIs, and enable Industry 4.0 transformation across the electronics sector.

Scope

As an independent contractor, you will provide the following services:

• Design and deliver backend features in Python for large-scale enterprise SaaS.
• Contribute to technical excellence through testing, CI/CD, and secure design.
• Provide technical guidance and architectural input across backend initiatives.
• Design data models and pipelines that turn high-volume sensor data streams into clean, structured time-series events, handling late-arriving data, retention windows, and reclassification when downstream rules change.
• Own a sync and reconciliation engine that keeps thousands of distributed edge clients consistent with the cloud, incremental updates on demand, retroactive resync to correct historical state, and atomic merging of concurrent edits without data loss.
• Build integrations between our platform and customer enterprise systems; keep two systems of record consistent under partial failures, late data, and ambiguous record matching.
• Design for correctness under concurrency, interval-based data, transactional guarantees across long-running workflows, and consistency between async workers, polling clients, and human edits.
• Build a configuration system that lets large enterprise customers tailor behaviour without forking the codebase, formula-driven configuration evaluated against a runtime context, with safe extension points for customer-specific logic.
• Build APIs reliable and fast enough to power latency-sensitive operational UIs, endpoints hit every few seconds, where a slow or wrong response is immediately visible to a paying customer.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of professional software development (Python and Django required).
• Experience with large, complex backend SaaS applications.
• Strong skills in modelling complex data systems and delivering scalable solutions.
• Hands-on experience supporting production code and iterating with customer feedback.
• Celery, RabbitMQ, TimescaleDB/Athena, manufacturing/industrial tech background is a plus.

About the Stack

ArchFX Cloud is primarily a Django API server deployed on AWS using Kubernetes, with a PostgreSQL database for all metadata and Athena over S3 for machine data. High-volume machine data is served via a dedicated TimescaleDB time series database and merged with low-volume metadata inside the Django APIs. Customer-facing UIs are implemented as a single-page web app in TypeScript/ Angular. All backend code is written in Python. Background workers run via Celery on RabbitMQ. The product is delivered as SaaS, primarily in single-tenant deployments for large enterprise customers, with infrastructure managed via Terraform and a continuous delivery mindset.

Engagement Terms

Contract Rate

The annualised contract rate for this engagement is USD $120,000 – $140,000, based on qualifications, experience, skills, and scope of services. Final rate is determined by relevant technical expertise, experience, and expected contribution. Rates may be paid in equivalent local currency or USD as agreed in the services agreement.

Contractor Status

This is an independent contractor (B2B) engagement and is not an offer of employment. The following apply:

• No employment relationship is created between the contractor and Arch Systems.
• The contractor is solely responsible for all taxes, VAT/GST, social security contributions, pension contributions, and any other statutory obligations in their country of residence.
• The contractor must maintain any registrations, licences, or business entities required by applicable law in their jurisdiction to legally provide services on a self-employed or B2B basis.
• The contractor is responsible for their own professional indemnity, public liability, or other applicable insurance as required in their jurisdiction.

Governing Law & Jurisdiction

Specific contractual terms, governing law, and jurisdiction will be set out in a written services agreement prior to commencement of work. Contractors are encouraged to seek independent legal advice before signing.

Location & Eligibility

This engagement is open to contractors based in CET/CEST timezone. Arch champions a remote-first work environment and welcomes talent across the region.

Contractors must be legally eligible to provide independent contractor services from their country of residence. Arch Systems does not provide visa sponsorship, work authorisation, or employment sponsorship of any kind in connection with this contractor engagement.

Sanctions & Regulatory Compliance

Arch Systems is committed to full compliance with regulations from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and all applicable international sanctions programmes. We do not enter into contractor engagements, or any transactions, that conflict with OFAC regulations or applicable sanctions.

Applicants located in, or nationals of, countries or regions subject to comprehensive US or applicable international sanctions are not eligible for this engagement. By applying, candidates confirm they are not subject to any applicable sanctions restrictions.

Application Process

Please submit resumes in English. We encourage candidates with deep backend and distributed systems experience to apply, even if they do not meet every listed qualification.

This posting is for an independent contractor engagement only. Nothing in this posting constitutes an offer of employment, a guarantee of engagement, or a representation of the terms of any specific contract. Final terms are subject to a written services agreement.

About Arch Systems

At Arch Systems, we empower discrete manufacturing facilities with deep data insights that enable optimal efficiency, precise KPIs, and proactive decision-making. We work with leading manufacturers to integrate and optimise their data for actionable intelligence, fuelling productivity and operational excellence.