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