Senior Python Backend Engineer

Job Description

Senior Python Backend Engineer - Startup – San Francisco Bay Area

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Senior Python Backend Engineer is required by a AI startup building AI customer-service agents that can talk to customers by phone, chat, or messaging apps almost like a human support representative. The company is looking for a senior python engineer to help shape the technical direction of their backend systems. You'll lead complex projects, make architectural decisions that affect the whole platform, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team. This is a role for someone who wants to build, not just advise. You'll write code, own systems, and ship, but you'll also be expected to think beyond your immediate work to identify what the team should be building next and how we should build it.

Requirements
STEM degree from a top university globally
7 - 15 years of experience in backend/infrastructure engineering, with Python and distributed systems
System design expertise for scalable, reliable backend platforms
Experience at high-growth SaaS startups or top-tier tech
Experience independently owning and driving initiatives to completion without oversight
Uses AI coding tools (Curs or Claude) actively
Must work on-site 5 days/week in San Francisco. Must also already be located locally, not interested in candidates who need to relocate.

What you'll do:
Designing how our agent infrastructure should evolve as we scale, making tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and complexity
Owning the most ambiguous, highest-stakes projects where getting it wrong would hurt the business
Identifying gaps in our systems before they become problems and building the case for addressing them
Setting standards for code review, system design, and operational excellence through your own work

Tech stack
Python, Django, FastAPI, TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Modal, Kubernetes, Postgres, Next.js