Backend Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in India.

📋 Description

• Design and implement REST APIs, encompassing contracts, versioning, authentication, rate limits, migrations, and documentation.

• Create data models and schemas across relational and graph databases, ensuring integrity and optimal performance.

• Troubleshoot customer issues from start to finish by utilizing logs, metrics, and traces; replicate issues, resolve them, and establish preventative measures.

• Enhance performance through SQL optimization, using EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, indexing, partitioning, pagination, and caching solutions like Redis.

• Develop Python services employing asynchronous programming when applicable, utilizing FastAPI, Django/DRF, or Flask.

• Create background jobs, queues, and schedulers.

• Containerize services using Docker and deploy them on Kubernetes/EKS.

• Manage services leveraging AWS components such as EC2, RDS/Aurora, S3, and IAM.

• Implement systems with custom metrics, structured logging, and tracing capabilities.

• Establish SLOs and monitoring alerts using CloudWatch, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry.

• Collaborate with frontend and research teams to define APIs and deliver features for production.

• Report directly to Deshraj Yadav, Co-founder and CTO.

• Work closely with the engineering team situated in San Francisco.

⛳️ Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in developing backend systems and deploying REST APIs to production environments.

• Strong foundational knowledge of Python.

• Experience with asynchronous programming and a major web framework (FastAPI/Django/Flask).

• Proficient in data modeling and SQL.

• Practical experience in query optimization and performance troubleshooting in Postgres/MySQL.

• Familiarity with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j or Amazon Neptune).

• Comfortable with running services on AWS using Docker and Kubernetes.

• Proven skills in root-cause analysis and accountability from incident management to preventive measures.

• Excellent communication skills and effective collaboration with frontend, research teams, and customers.

• Experience with GraphQL/gRPC is a plus.

• Familiarity with event-driven systems (SNS/SQS/Kafka) and background task frameworks (Celery/RQ) is advantageous.

• Experience with caching, rate limiting, multi-tenancy, and feature-flag strategies is preferred.

• Knowledge of security and privacy best practices is a plus.

• Experience with deep observability is desirable.

• Previous work with search/retrieval or memory systems is a plus.

• On-call experience and conducting blameless postmortems is a plus.

• Experience in an early-stage startup environment is an advantage.

🏝️ Benefits

• Backed by $24M in Series A & Seed funding.

• Operate within an early-stage startup atmosphere.

• High degree of autonomy and responsibility to address challenges.

• A culture of trust and the freedom to innovate.

• Engage in code reviews, idea discussions, and celebrate achievements.

• Opportunity to create long-term foundational systems.

• Collaborate closely with founders, engineering, frontend, research teams, and customers.