Lead Backend Engineer

The Role

We’re hiring a lead backend engineer to own and harden the systems at the center of our product. You’ll work in a Python backend with clear service boundaries, ship production changes with high ownership, and raise the bar on reliability, performance, and design.

This is not a CRUD API role. You’ll reason about ranking and retrieval quality, multi-tenant data models, external API complexity, and LLM systems that have to work under real support-desk constraints.

What You'll Work On

• Search & retrieval: Modern search and retrieval systems (e.g., Elasticsearch, PgVector), airflow, filters, embeddings, and result quality
• Answer / QA services: orchestration around LLMs, prompt engineering, and agentic tool use
• Integrations & auth: connectors and OAuth/SSO/SAML flows across various support platforms
• Async & data pipelines: Async job systems, data pipelines, and ingestion workflows for heterogeneous source data
• APIs & data model: REST services, ORM/data modeling, and database migrations, multi-tenant correctness
• Production systems: Redis, container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), observability, feature flags, and robust testing frameworks

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years building production backend systems (or equivalent depth)
• Expert-level Python and comfort in large existing codebases
• Strong experience with relational data modeling (Postgres), migrations, and query performance
• Experience with search or information retrieval (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, vector search, or similar): or clear evidence you can ramp fast
• Experience designing reliable integrations with third-party APIs (auth, rate limits, webhooks, eventual consistency)
• Familiarity with async job systems (Celery, Sidekiq, RQ, or similar) and production debugging
• High bar for code quality: tests, clear interfaces, careful rollouts, written design when the problem warrants it
• Ability to own problems end-to-end with minimal hand-holding

Must Have

• LLM/RAG systems in production (grounding, evaluation, tool calling)
• Flask or comparable Python web frameworks (Django/FastAPI fine)
• Enterprise identity (SAML, OAuth2, SSO)
• Airflow, Singer/Meltano taps, or dbt
• Kubernetes / GCP
• Frontend TypeScript, React for full-stack debugging
• Familiarity with ticket systems (e.g., Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow)

How We Work

• Collaborative, high-ownership engineering culture
• Ship in small, reviewable PRs; pair when the problem is hard
• Depth matters: we value engineers who can go deep on search quality, integration edge cases, and production incidents

What Success Looks Like in the First 6 Months

• Independently ship backend features across search, answers, or integrations with clean designs and solid tests
• Become a trusted owner for at least one critical backend surface (e.g. retrieval, QA orchestration, or a major connector family)
• Improve reliability or performance of a hot path you’ve touched
• Raise team quality through thoughtful reviews and clear technical writing