Senior Software Engineer - Backend (SSE)

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to design and build scalable, cloud-native backend systems using Django and FastAPI, while directly managing a team of engineers. This is a player-coach role combining hands-on backend architecture ownership with people management — you'll own service design, database performance, and API reliability, while also managing the day-to-day performance, growth, and output of your direct reports. A meaningful slice of the work involves LLM-powered features: RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, and integrations with vector databases. You'll drive technical decisions, manage and mentor engineers, and be a hands-on senior IC who can also lead design discussions.

Responsibilities

1. Design and architect scalable, high-performance backend services using Django and FastAPI
2. Lead technical design discussions and conduct architecture reviews for new features and systems
3. Create, maintain, and document RESTful APIs with a focus on reliability, security, and versioning
4. Design efficient database schemas, optimize complex queries, and ensure data integrity (PostgreSQL/MySQL)
5. Design and implement cloud-native solutions leveraging microservices and serverless architectures
6. Conduct thorough code reviews and enforce coding standards across the team
7. Provide effort estimations for project and sprint planning
8. Guide and mentor engineers on best practices and technical growth, in addition to formal management duties above
9. Collaborate with product, QA, and DevOps to drive projects to completion
10. Document technical specifications, architecture decisions, and API contracts

Requirements

1. 5–7 years of backend development experience with strong, demonstrated proficiency in Django and FastAPI
2. 1–2 years of direct people management experience — formal reporting relationships
3. Deep understanding of SQL, query optimization, and Django ORM
4. Hands-on experience with Docker containerization
5. Understanding of microservices and event-driven architectures
6. Experience building and deploying serverless backends (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions)
7. Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) including deployment, monitoring, and debugging is a plus.
8. Practical experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) into production applications
9. Working knowledge of RAG architecture and at least one vector database
10. Proven experience in effort estimation, technical planning, and architecture reviews
11. Strong communication skills and demonstrated experience managing and/or mentoring junior developers

Good to Have

• Experience with an agent framework or SDK — LangChain, LangGraph, or Claude Agent SDK (framework-agnostic; any one of these is a plus)
• Experience with message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS)
• Exposure to performance profiling and optimization techniques