Senior Backend, Data & ML Developer

About the role
You'll take technical ownership of our Backend, Data & ML team and lead the backend development team. You'll design and scale our backend services, APIs and data systems, and bring data science and ML models into production. You'll also be the main technical link to the React Native and Next.js teams.

What you'll do

• Own backend architecture, API design, databases and data infrastructure.
• Design and build data pipelines and data models for analytics and ML.
• Lead the implementation, deployment and monitoring of ML models and data science algorithms in production.
• Work closely with the React Native and Next.js teams on API contracts, data flows and ML/DS integrations.
• Mentor the backend and data team, review code, and set engineering standards along with the TPM.
• Ensure system reliability, security, scalability and observability.
• Take part in the senior on-call rotation, including international paging.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years of backend development, with significant experience in data engineering.
• Strong expertise in Django, relational databases, and API design (REST/GraphQL).
• Hands-on experience building data pipelines.
• Some practical experience deploying ML models to production, including serving, versioning, monitoring and retraining (MLOps).
• Some understanding of common data science algorithms and ML techniques.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP or Azure), containers and CI/CD.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers.
• Excellent communication skills. You should be able to explain backend and data decisions clearly to mobile and web teams.

Note: Full-stack experience is valuable but not mandatory. A strong backend and data specialist who works well with the frontend and mobile teams is a great fit.

Nice to have

• Python ML ecosystem experience (for example scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow or pandas).
• Experience with LLMs, recommendation systems or real-time data processing.
• Experience with unstructured data
• Familiarity with Next.js or React Native.
• Familiarity with US data protection requirements and compliance laws, such as FERPA or COPPA