Senior Backend Engineer
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- New York, USA
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- ⦁ 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with meaningful time spent building systems at scale.
- ⦁ Strong Python proficiency is required — with the confidence that picking up Go would be a non-issue (Go experience is a plus but not required).
- ⦁ Experience with distributed systems and microservices architecture.
- ⦁ Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases; comfortable handling data processing at scale.
- ⦁ Startup or small-team experience strongly preferred — candidates who have operated with real ownership and built new systems, rather than only maintained existing ones.
Nice to have
- ⦁ Experience with graph databases (major plus — core to our client’s stack).
- ⦁ Experience with Go.
- ⦁ Familiarity with RAG architectures and the broader GenAI landscape.
- ⦁ Experience with real-time data processing, streaming technologies, and concurrency at scale.
- ⦁ Understanding of ML/AI concepts, particularly in forecasting and NLP.
- ⦁ Kubernetes and container orchestration experience.
- Logistics
- Location
- New York City — 4 days/week in office, with engineering typically taking Fridays flexible/remote. Additional case-by-case flexibility is available; it’s an in-person culture with understanding, not a
Full description
About Our Client
Our client is an applied AI and data analytics company building the intelligence layer for enterprise decision-making. Their platform unifies an organization’s full data landscape — internal systems, social media signals, industry reports, and consumer behavior data — into a single coherent intelligence layer that surfaces insights and automates workflows that previously took analysts weeks to complete.
The core thesis: research and data today are stuck in an outdated state — very little of it is connected, and enormous value is lost in that dark data. Our client is turning sentiment from a lagging indicator into a leading one, allowing brands to make decisions months earlier than legacy research tools allow. The platform is being built toward a consumer ontology (comparable in spirit to Palantir’s ontology, but for consumer intelligence), powered by a production graph RAG system that connects signals across temporal and sentiment data at a scale that hasn’t been attempted before.
The platform is driving 8-figure gross-margin improvements for Fortune 500 retailers. The go-to-market is a classic land-and-expand: starting in insights and research, then expanding into innovation, marketing, and eventually supply chain and manufacturing.
Founded by a technical team with deep backgrounds in innovation and graph databases. $14M raised in seed funding. The company is launching publicly after nearly two years in stealth. Zero attrition to date — no one has left. The culture is strong: weekly team activities (ping pong tournaments, Yankees games, happy hours, game nights), with plus-ones welcome at events.
This is a ground-floor opportunity — engineers joining at this stage will have outsized influence on architecture, product direction, and culture.
About the Role
This is our client’s highest-priority hire. A staff backend engineer is currently working across large portions of the platform, and the goal is to add additional senior backend capacity. The focus is on two things:
- Architecture and scale — ensuring the platform can sustain significantly higher usage as enterprise onboarding ramps up.
- Building innovative new features on the roadmap with architecturally sound decisions that hold up for years, not just months.
In practice, this means working across the graph database layer, API infrastructure, data pipelines with concurrency at scale, and net-new feature development. This is a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) role — a hands-on senior IC who can own systems end-to-end.
The sweet spot: someone senior enough to think about architecture at a high level, but who still has boundless energy and excitement for actual implementation. Not someone who has moved past hands-on work.