Founding Backend Engineer

My client is an AI company with a small, highly technical team of ten that has just raised a £4M pre seed round to fund its next phase of growth. They’re hiring a Backend Engineer to own the core platform as throughput scales 100x over the next year.

This is a genuine ownership role. You’ll work directly with the CTO on architecture and alongside ML and content engineers, with clear scope to grow into technical leadership.

What you’ll own

• Service architecture: boundaries, API and data contracts, and how services communicate
• A full platform migration from Railway to Cloudflare, from target architecture through cutover, with zero disruption to production
• Deployments and production health: CI/CD, environments, rollbacks, secrets, observability and feature flags
• The scheduler, queues and sandboxes behind long running, multistep workloads
• Internal APIs and the Postgres data platform, including schema design, migrations and performance at scale
• The backend engineering standard: code quality, documentation and the guardrails that let the team ship fast

What my client is looking for

• 4+ years building and operating backend systems in production, with strong Python and TypeScript
• Production experience with job and workflow systems, and sound judgement on idempotency, retries, backoff and concurrency
• Deep Postgres experience, including migrations on live data and query performance
• A track record of building infrastructure from scratch, scaling it through rapid growth, and leading at least one significant platform migration
• End to end infrastructure ownership: containers, CI/CD, networking, observability and incidents
• Experience leading technical work through setting direction, reviewing designs and mentoring

Nice to have

• Cloudflare in production (Workers, Queues, Workflows, Durable Objects, R2)
• Event driven systems, outbox patterns and webhooks
• Founding or early engineer experience, or equivalent ownership in a larger company
• Stack: Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic), TypeScript, Postgres, Docker, GitHub Actions, Sentry, LLM APIs.