Senior Backend Engineer — AI Video Systems (Contract, Remote)

About Overvak

Overvak is building an AI-powered platform that helps parents stay connected to what matters
most by transforming hours of home camera footage into meaningful moments, intelligent alerts,
and daily summaries.
Our platform combines computer vision, audio intelligence, cloud infrastructure, and mobile
applications to deliver an experience that goes far beyond traditional home monitoring.
We're currently preparing our production-ready platform for a closed beta and are looking for an
experienced backend engineer to accelerate development alongside our Founding Engineer.

🎯 The Role

We are looking for a highly technical Senior Backend Engineer who thrives in fast-paced startup
environments.
Your primary objective will be to work alongside our Founding Engineer to accelerate
development, improve platform stability, resolve technical debt, and help prepare Overvak for a
successful closed beta.
This is not a role where you'll be building isolated features independently. You'll be collaborating
closely with an existing codebase, contributing production-quality code, reviewing
implementations, fixing complex issues, and helping increase overall engineering velocity.
We are looking for someone who enjoys solving difficult engineering problems, can quickly
understand an existing architecture, and takes ownership without requiring extensive guidance.

What You'll Do

• Collaborate daily with the Founding Engineer to execute engineering priorities
• Build and improve scalable backend services
• Optimize existing APIs and microservices
• Improve reliability, performance, and observability across the platform
• Troubleshoot production and integration issues
• Help reduce technical debt through thoughtful refactoring
• Improve system performance and cloud infrastructure
• Assist with backend architecture decisions while maintaining development velocity
• Build new backend functionality supporting the mobile application
• Improve authentication, authorization, and security where needed
• Review pull requests and maintain high code quality
• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code
• Help prepare the platform for production deployment and closed beta

Areas You'll Likely Work On

Depending on priorities, projects may include:

• Backend API improvements (FastAPI/Python)
• Cloud Run services
• Cloud SQL optimization
• Event processing pipelines
• AI inference orchestration
• Video processing workflows
• Notification pipeline
• User/account management
• Authentication services
• Performance optimization
• Logging and monitoring improvements
• Production readiness
• Bug fixing and technical debt reduction

Technical Requirements

Must have:

• 5+ years building backend systems in production
• Strong Python experience
• Experience with FastAPI (or similar modern Python frameworks)
• Experience designing REST APIs
• Experience with PostgreSQL
• Experience with Docker
• Experience with Git and collaborative development workflows
• Experience deploying cloud-native applications
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills
• Experience working in startup or small engineering teams
• Ability to quickly understand and contribute to an existing codebase

Preferred:

• Google Cloud Platform
• Cloud Run
• Cloud SQL
• Pub/Sub
• Redis
• Background job processing
• Video or media processing pipelines
• AI/ML platform integration
• Microservices architecture
• Monitoring and observability tooling

Who You Are

We're looking for someone who:

• Is highly accountable and delivers on commitments
• Communicates proactively and clearly
• Works independently while collaborating effectively with teammates
• Writes production-quality code—not just code that works
• Is comfortable wearing multiple hats in a startup
• Takes initiative identifying problems and proposing solutions
• Values speed without sacrificing quality
• Can break down complex technical problems into actionable tasks