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
- Design and architect scalable, high-performance backend services using Django and FastAPI
- Lead technical design discussions and conduct architecture reviews for new features and systems
- Create, maintain, and document RESTful APIs with a focus on reliability, security, and versioning
- Design efficient database schemas, optimize complex queries, and ensure data integrity (PostgreSQL/MySQL)
- Design and implement cloud-native solutions leveraging microservices and serverless architectures
- Conduct thorough code reviews and enforce coding standards across the team
- Provide effort estimations for project and sprint planning
- Guide and mentor engineers on best practices and technical growth, in addition to formal management duties above
- Collaborate with product, QA, and DevOps to drive projects to completion
- Document technical specifications, architecture decisions, and API contracts
Requirements
- 5–7 years of backend development experience with strong, demonstrated proficiency in Django and FastAPI
- 1–2 years of direct people management experience — formal reporting relationships
- Deep understanding of SQL, query optimization, and Django ORM
- Hands-on experience with Docker containerization
- Understanding of microservices and event-driven architectures
- Experience building and deploying serverless backends (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions)
- Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) including deployment, monitoring, and debugging is a plus.
- Practical experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) into production applications
- Working knowledge of RAG architecture and at least one vector database
- Proven experience in effort estimation, technical planning, and architecture reviews
- 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
Skills: team lead,django,fastapi,artificial intelligence,database,python,cloud
