Principal Backend Engineer (Architect Track) - Remote

Responsibilities

• We’re hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to take ownership of backend architecture as a hands-on technical leader. No direct reports. About half your time is in the code — reference implementations, critical components, refactors. The other half is the harder work: deciding what to build, what to buy, what to defer, and why.
• Our backend today is a Python core (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Celery, Postgres, Redis), surrounded by services and event-driven flows, with a growing AI layer. It runs primarily on AWS, with GCP for data and AI workloads. There are real architectural questions to answer: how to evolve the monolith, how to set service boundaries, how to design for geo-distribution as we grow, and how to integrate AI without accumulating debt. We’re looking for someone who treats those questions seriously — researches before deciding, thinks in tradeoffs, writes things down.
• Service blueprints: API conventions, EDA patterns, testing, observability, deployment
• Cloud architecture across AWS (primary) and GCP, including multi-region and geo-distributed designs
• Buy vs. build vs. assemble — knowing when a managed service, a no-code tool (Retool, n8n), or an agentic-coding POC (Claude Code, Cursor) is the right call, and when it isn’t
• Experience designing high-load, latency-sensitive, and geo-distributed systems
• Pragmatic judgment on buy vs. build vs. assemble — managed services, no-code, and agentic tooling as first-class options, not shortcuts
• A fun, dynamic team that loves building innovative products.Unlimited holidays – because we trust you to deliver.

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