{"id":68236,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shelf-senior-backend-python-engineer","title":"Senior Backend Python Engineer","company":{"id":22512,"name":"Shelf.AI","domain":"shelf.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/shelf","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Warsaw, Poland"],"countries":["PL"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":29516,"max":44275,"currency":"PLN","period":"month","gross":null,"usd_annual":142032},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"HIPAA","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SOC 2","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-21T08:00:26Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-08-21T08:00:26Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":58,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":58},"description":"About Shelf\nThe enterprise is going agentic and we are creating a unique operating system for an automated future.\nMost AI agents break the moment they hit real business complexity. That's why we built a platform that models a company's policies, workflows, and operational logic into an AI Data Model. Shelf enables AI Agents to reliably reason and deliver precise and reliable outcomes at scale.\nWe already have what most AI startups are still trying to earn: Enterprise customers such as Glovo, Nespresso, and HelloFresh, real production data, and tens of thousands of users. Customers trust us with operational knowledge: Our platform is highly reliable and secure with SOC2, HIPAA-ready security practices, and mature integrations in place.\nJob Description:\nThis role is for a senior backend engineer who can design and own business-critical systems.\nWe want someone who is strong technically, communicates clearly, and has the judgment to make systems simpler, safer, and easier to evolve over time. Expect real ownership from system design through production.\nThe team is small enough for engineers to make real decisions. Career growth comes from ownership. Titles matter less than the scope you can carry. The people who grow fastest take responsibility for larger systems, drive customer outcomes, and strive to develop better engineering practices.\nYou solve ambiguous problems by shaping the right architectural approach, then ship, iterate, and keep it healthy in production.\nWe build AI-native. Engineers use Codex, Claude Code, and agents they build themselves. We invest in harness engineering through skills, CLIs, logs, traces, and orchestration.\nThis is a role for someone in a high-growth chapter of their career, who wants to do the best work of their life, learn fast, and win as part of a team going all-in on a hard mission.\nLocation - Warsaw, work from the office.\nWhat You Will Own\nDesign and ship backend services, APIs, data flows, and background processing for production systems\n\nTurn vague requirements into concrete technical plans, trade-offs, and execution\n\nOwn services after launch: reliability, observability, performance, and incident follow-through\n\nInstrument what you ship and use production signal to iterate, not just to keep the lights on\n\nMake sound decisions around system boundaries, data models, interfaces, and scaling paths\n\nWork closely with product, frontend, and platform engineers to deliver end-to-end outcomes\n\nImprove engineering leverage with AI tooling, automation, and internal workflows rather than using AI as a gimmick\n\nRaise the quality bar through code review, design review, and pragmatic technical leadership\n\nWhat Strong Performance Looks Like\nYou reliably move important backend work forward without waiting to be tightly managed.\n\nYour systems are easier to operate and easier to change because of your design decisions.\n\nYou make smart trade-offs to unblock shipping - and you stand by those decisions.\n\nYou keep raising the bar on engineering excellence for yourself and everyone else.\n\nWhat We Are Looking For\nStrong senior-level backend engineering experience in production systems\n\nStrong Python skills and the ability to design clean, maintainable backend code\n\nGood distributed systems judgment: concurrency, failure handling, data consistency, async work, and service boundaries\n\nHands-on experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, or Azure\n\nComfort with database schema design and performance tuning for real-time and high throughput scenarios\n\nA security-conscious approach to engineering: you build for enterprise-grade requirements, handle sensitive data carefully, and think about the security implications of the systems and AI workflows you ship\n\nAbility to go from problem statement to design to production rollout with real ownership\n\nClear written and verbal communication. You can explain systems, trade-offs, and incidents without hiding behind jargon\n\nAI-native working style. You already use AI tools in your daily engineering workflow, and you're excited to improve how the team builds, not just your own output: better tooling, workflows, and engineering leverage\n\nStrong Plus\nExperience building agentic systems: AI agents, tool-calling, orchestration, retrieval, or LLM-backed infrastructure in production\n\nWorking knowledge of TypeScript or the ability to contribute across the stack when needed\n\nExperience shaping technical direction for other engineers, even without formal management responsibility\n\nHow We Evaluate Fit\nWe care more about ownership, systems judgment, and learning velocity than a perfect keyword match to our stack. If you are the kind of engineer who can take a messy problem and turn it into a strong production system, we want to talk.\nWhat Shelf Offers:\nB2B contract.\n\nCompany Stock Options.\n\nHardware: MacBook Pro.\n\nModern technical stack. Develop open-source software.\n\nGitHub Copilot subscription.\n\nA strong AI-native engineering environment with modern tools and room to experiment, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot.\n\nWhy Shelf:\nBecoming one of the defining companies of the AI age is a hard plan, and our leadership team has the rare mix of deep AI, knowledge-management, and enterprise SaaS experience to actually execute it\n\nWe have raised over $60 million in funding; our investors include Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Base10, and others\n\nRecognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, with high-velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category\n\nWe love our customers and our customers love us. Ask a Shelf customer why, and they'll tell you it's our innovative capabilities and rock-solid reliability, that they enjoy working with our people, and most of all, the improvements they see in their business KPIs\n\nWe're building fast across three hubs: our New York HQ and our Product and Engineering centers in Warsaw and Lviv","description_format":"text","description_chars":5907,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Apple Macbook","Stock options"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["E-commerce Platforms","Conversational AI","Online Groceries","Retail & Commerce AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-21T08:00:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":0.4,"p_active":0.455,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":56,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["seen:56","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":142032,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/shelf-senior-backend-python-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/shelf-senior-backend-python-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T15:53:15Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21862,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":22512},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=22512"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fshelf-senior-backend-python-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fshelf-senior-backend-python-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fshelf-senior-backend-python-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/shelf-senior-backend-python-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fshelf-senior-backend-python-engineer"}]}