Backend engineer

Backend python engineer | ML | Infrastructure | Reliability |

Full remote - ideally European based.

We’re hiring a Backend Software Engineer to own and operate mission-critical Django services that orchestrate large-scale ML inference workflows in production.

About the Role

This is a hands-on, end-to-end ownership role focused on building reliable, high-throughput backend systems — not a research role, not a pure infra role, and not a ticket-driven support position.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and run Django services in production
• Own high-throughput async workflows using queues, workers, and schedulers
• Implement safe orchestration patterns: retries, idempotency, rate limiting, backpressure
• Define and operate SLOs, error budgets, alerts, and on-call
• Lead incident response and write postmortems that drive real improvements
• Build end-to-end observability (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, runbooks)
• Improve reliability of service integrations using timeouts, circuit breakers, and fallbacks
• Work closely with ML engineers to productionise inference pipelines
• Own CI/CD and deployment workflows for backend services
• Use Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to support reliability and scale
• Optimise performance and cost across compute, storage, databases, and external APIs

Qualifications

• Strong experience as a Python backend engineer owning production systems
• Hands-on experience running Django in production (ORM, migrations, performance tuning)
• Experience building and operating asynchronous job systems (Celery, RQ, Arq, or similar)
• Experience with workflow/orchestration systems (Temporal, Prefect, Airflow, Step Functions, etc.)
• Solid understanding of distributed systems reliability (timeouts, retries, idempotency, rate limiting, backpressure)
• Experience defining and operating SLOs/SLAs and participating in on-call
• Strong Linux, networking, and debugging fundamentals
• Experience with AWS and/or GCP
• Practical experience using Terraform as part of a wider system

Required Skills

• Experience running ML inference or training systems at scale
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling (SageMaker, Vertex AI, Kubeflow, MLflow, Argo)
• Experience with observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Loki)
• Experience operating Postgres and Redis in high-throughput environments
• Startup or greenfield system ownership experience

Preferred Skills

• Experience running ML inference or training systems at scale
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling (SageMaker, Vertex AI, Kubeflow, MLflow, Argo)
• Experience with observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Loki)
• Experience operating Postgres and Redis in high-throughput environments
• Startup or greenfield system ownership experience