Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer responsible for end-to-end backend ownership: service architecture, API design, reliability posture, and long-term technical direction. You will work directly with the founders, help define the roadmap, and become the de facto owner of the entire backend system.

What you'll do

• Own the backend end-to-end: service architecture, API design, reliability posture, and long-term technical direction.
• Design and build durable workflows using Temporal - long-running processes, async coordination, saga patterns.
• Design for failure: retries, timeouts, graceful degradation, and recovery paths built in from the start.
• Own workflow observability: know when a workflow is stuck, degraded, or silently wrong before a customer notices.
• Detect regressions before they become incidents; build the tooling to catch them early.
• Set the bar on code quality, service boundaries, and shared abstractions across the engineering team.
• Make foundational decisions with conviction, document the reasoning, and evolve them as the system grows.

What you'll need

• 6+ years building and operating backend systems in Python, with clear ownership of production services.
• Python depth: you make deliberate choices about async vs. sync, framework selection, and performance tradeoffs.
• Experience with Temporal or a comparable workflow engine in production; you understand durable execution, not just task queues.
• Reliability instinct: idempotency, retries, and observability are part of how you design, not afterthoughts.
• End-to-end ownership: comfortable being the person who holds the full backend picture and identifies what's broken or missing before you're asked.
• A real spike: bring a 10x improvement in an area the team is currently underinvested in - workflow systems, data infrastructure, AI-native patterns, or deep domain expertise.