Staff Backend Engineer

We're looking for a highly skilled Staff Backend Engineer to design and build robust, scalable, and secure distributed systems. As a critical member of our engineering team, you'll use your expertise in Python to build cloud-native applications that power our core services. We currently operate in an AWS environment, and the core need is strong distributed systems and backend fundamentals.
Key Responsibilities

- Build backend logic for event-driven systems using message queues and pub/sub services, with strong data processing and file-handling logic.

- Manage concurrent tasks efficiently in distributed environments using asynchronous programming techniques.

- Design and implement data processing pipelines across cloud storage, compute, and database services.

- Optimize applications for performance and scalability through caching, async calls, and latency reduction.

- Design and develop serverless applications and RESTful APIs using Flask or FastAPI.

- Follow cloud security best practices (IAM, encryption, network isolation), and implement authentication mechanisms (OAuth, JWT, or managed identity services).

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Must-Have Skills

- 5+ years of hands-on Python backend development experience, with solid exposure to cloud-native or serverless solutions (AWS preferred).

- Proven experience with distributed systems concepts — event-driven architecture, message queues, and scalable data pipelines.

- Hands-on experience with asynchronous and concurrent programming.

- Strong testing and debugging skills across distributed architectures.

Nice-to-Have

- Exposure to GenAI tooling or LLM-based systems, particularly RAG or agentic RAG architectures, is a plus.

- Experience integrating LLM APIs into backend services or workflows.

- Familiarity with vector databases and embedding-based search.

Soft Skills

- Builder mindset: thrives on writing, debugging, and improving production code.

- Collaborative, humble, and open to feedback.

- Strong communicator who explains design decisions clearly.

- Influences through contribution, not hierarchy.

Originally posted on Himalayas