Backend Engineer

About the Role We're looking for a passionate Backend Engineer to build and scale the backend systems that power our AI platform for engineering simulation. You'll work on production-grade APIs,distributed microservices, event-driven architectures, durable long-running workflows, and cloud-native infrastructure. It's a new platform, built from the first commit. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving complex backend problems, building highly scalable systems, and taking ownership of services from design to production. You'll collaborate closely with ML engineers, simulation engineers, and platform engineers to build reliable backend services capable of handling high-throughput AI and simulation workloads in a fast-paced startup environment. What You'll Build Production-grade REST and gRPC APIs using FastAPI Distributed microservices powering AI and simulation workflows Durable, long-running workflows using Temporal Event-driven systems using Kafka or Pub/Sub Scalable PostgreSQL data models, including vector search Cloud-native, observable services on Kubernetes Key Responsibilities Backend Development Design, develop, and maintain REST APIs (FastAPI) and gRPC services, contract- first Build modular, reusable, type-safe, and well-tested backend services Design PostgreSQL schemas with proper indexing, constraints, and migrations, and optimize queries Build durable, long-running workflows using Temporal: workflows that run for hours, wait for human input, and resume after failures Build asynchronous processing using Kafka, Celery, Redis, or Airflow Integrate backend services with storage such as GCS/S3 and internal platform services Distributed Systems Build resilient systems with retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency, and failure recovery Design stateless, horizontally scalable services with both synchronous and asynchronous communication Keep each customer's data isolated at every layer of a multi-tenant platform Platform & Cloud Work with GCP services such as GKE, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, and Pub/Sub, and with PostgreSQL run in our own containers on Kubernetes Implement caching strategies using Redis Reliability & Observability Implement structured logging and instrument services with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. Improve reliability through health checks, readiness probes, graceful shutdowns, and fault tolerance. Participate in production debugging, incident response, and performance optimization. Required Skills Backend Engineering 4+ years of professional backend development experience Strong Python skills, including async programming (async/await, concurrency, background workers) with FastAPI Experience with the modern Python service stack: Pydantic, SQLAlchemy (async), Alembic, pytest, and mypy Solid REST and gRPC API design, contract-first (OpenAPI, protobuf, JSON Schema) Experience with PostgreSQL, database design, and query optimization; familiarity with vector databases such as pgvector Good understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures, with Kafka or Google Pub/Sub Understanding of multi-tenant system design Experience with Redis for caching, task queues, or rate limiting Cloud & DevOps Experience with Docker and deploying applications on Kubernetes (GKE preferred) Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred) Understanding of rolling deployments, rollbacks, secrets management, and configuration management. Good to Have Experience with Temporal or other workflow orchestration tools Experience with engineering simulation or physics: CAE tools, CFD or thermal analysis, solvers such as OpenFOAM or Ansys, or HPC Experience with the transactional outbox pattern and change data capture (Debezium) Experience with MCP or LLM agent frameworks such as LangGraph Experience with NoSQL and graph databases What We're Looking For We value engineers who: Take ownership from design to production Build scalable, reliable, observable, production-ready systems Bring strong debugging, problem-solving, and system design skills Make pragmatic engineering decisions with long-term maintainability in mind Communicate clearly and work independently in a fast-moving startup Are eager to learn new technologies and solve challenging backend problems Why Join Us? Build cutting-edge AI infrastructure on a new platform, from the first commit Work on products that operate at scale High ownership, minimal bureaucracy, and real influence on architecture Collaborate with experienced Backend, ML, Platform, and Simulation Engineers Continuous learning through mentorship and challenging engineering problems