Mid-Senior Python Software Engineer

About RetailLabs

RetailLabs is transforming fashion content creation with AI-powered visual production technology. Our platform helps fashion brands, marketplaces, and retailers generate high-quality, customisable digital visuals without traditional photoshoots.

We work on complex image-generation and image-processing systems involving virtual try-on, garment representation, model inference, masking, blending, pose estimation, and automated quality checks. Our goal is to make digital fashion visuals scalable, accurate, inclusive, and commercially reliable across many brands, markets, and sales channels.

At RetailLabs, engineering means combining computer science, visual judgment, and careful execution to build systems where small mistakes can visibly affect the final customer output.

The Role

We are looking for a Mid-Senior Python Software Engineer who is excellent at debugging complex production systems.

This is not a pure feature-building role, and it is not a generic infrastructure or reliability role. You will work close to the product, ML, computer vision, and customer success teams to investigate customer-reported issues, reproduce difficult bugs, understand the underlying technical cause, and ship precise fixes.

You will own problems end-to-end: from a vague customer report like “the jacket looks wrong” to a clear technical diagnosis, a code fix, a regression test, and a customer-facing resolution.

You will be working inside complex Python-based AI/image pipelines where correctness is not only about whether the code runs, but whether the resulting image looks right.

What You Will Own

You will be responsible for:

* Investigating production bugs in AI-driven image and visual-generation pipelines.

* Reproducing issues from screenshots, logs, artifacts, customer descriptions, and partial debugging data.

* Finding the real root cause, not just patching visible symptoms.

* Shipping careful, minimal, well-tested fixes.

* Writing regression tests and guardrails so the same issue does not return.

* Debugging across Python code, image-processing logic, model inference, data transformations, and pipeline orchestration.

* Helping customers and internal teams understand what went wrong and what was fixed.

* Identifying recurring technical failure patterns and proposing long-term improvements.

You will act as a technical owner for difficult production issues in our visual AI system.

You Will Thrive Here If You

* Enjoy opening unfamiliar Python code and quickly forming a debugging hypothesis.

* Like tracing how data moves through a complex pipeline.

* Are patient with intermittent, hard-to-reproduce bugs.

* Can distinguish symptoms from root causes.

* Prefer precise fixes over broad rewrites.

* Think carefully before changing code that affects production output.

* Care about correctness, visual quality, and customer impact.

* Can look at an image and describe what seems wrong: mask, alignment, scale, lighting, color, pose, blending, garment shape, or model output.

* Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical people.

* Stay calm when a customer issue is urgent.

This role is well suited to someone with strong computer science fundamentals, production Python experience, and an interest in AI, computer vision, image processing, or creative tooling.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities

You will regularly:

* Triage incoming customer and internal bug reports.

* Reproduce visual and technical issues using logs, screenshots, artifacts, and pipeline outputs.

* Debug Python services, scripts, workers, and image-processing components.

* Investigate issues involving NumPy arrays, OpenCV/PIL image operations, PyTorch inference outputs, masks, alpha channels, compositing, resizing, color changes, and post-processing logic.

* Use debugging tools, logging, profiling, and careful code reading to isolate problems.

* Write small, targeted fixes and the tests that would have caught the bug earlier.

* Review failure patterns and suggest improvements to the engineering team.

* Work closely with ML engineers, product managers, and customer success.

* Document fixes clearly so customers and internal teams understand the resolution.

Required Skills

We are looking for someone with:

* 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.

* Strong professional Python experience.

* Experience reading, understanding, and modifying code written by others.

* Strong debugging ability in real-world production systems.

* Comfort using tools such as `pdb`, `ipdb`, structured logging, profilers, stack traces, and runtime inspection.

* Solid understanding of Python typing, async code, multiprocessing, error handling, and logging discipline.

* Good Linux command-line skills.

* Git fluency, including practical use of branching, commits, blame, and code history.

* Experience writing tests for bugs and preventing regressions.

* Ability to communicate clearly in written English.

* Ability to work with incomplete information and still make structured debugging progress.

Strongly Preferred

Experience with any of the following is highly valuable:

* Image processing with NumPy, OpenCV, PIL/Pillow, or similar tools.

* PyTorch or similar frameworks at inference level.

* Computer vision pipelines.

* Virtual try-on, garment segmentation, human parsing, pose estimation, image masking, or image blending.

* Diffusion models or generative AI systems.

* Image-processing concepts such as color spaces, alpha compositing, resampling, gamma, masks, warping, and premultiplied alpha.

* Queue-based systems such as Celery, Redis, RabbitMQ, or similar worker architectures.

* Docker and containerized development.

* QA automation, production debugging, sustaining engineering, or customer-facing technical problem solving.

* Fashion, photography, retouching, rendering, creative tools, or visual production workflows.

What We Offer

* Flexible hybrid work.

* A central, modern office.

* Competitive compensation.

* High-impact work in fashion technology and AI.

* A collaborative engineering culture.

* The chance to work on complex visual AI systems with real customer impact.

* Career growth in a fast-moving, technical product environment.