Staff Back-End Engineer

Ideal Candidate:
- We need a proven, hands-on backend engineer with 8+ years of experience, though we will consider exceptional senior engineers (5+ years) who demonstrate staff-level impact.
- The candidate must have strong professional experience in Python, deep fundamentals in system design, and be based in Poland or remotely within the EU or USA with existing work authorization.
- This is a pure software engineering role; candidates from frontend, QA, data analysis, or pure management backgrounds are not a fit.
- The culture is 'Class A players only.'
- They are looking for proven achievers who are self-aware, intentional, and can clearly articulate what they built and why it mattered.
- Pedigree (top school/company) is only a signal if paired with demonstrated, high-impact work.
- This is not a role for 'potential' hires without a strong track record.

Required Qualifications:
- 8+ years professional experience post-graduation.
- Genuine backend/software-engineering IC or tech-lead role in their current title.
- Real working Python somewhere in the career.
- Proven scale and complexity at a high-traffic organization.
- Current, hands-on AI/LLM/agentic engineering work.
- Start-up experience.
- Strong Python.

Dealbreakers:
- Lacks true Staff-level maturity, architectural leadership, or ambiguous problem ownership.
- Strong academic pedigree but light practical/production experience.
- Currently in a pure people-management role.
- Frontend-only, QA-only, data-analyst-only, or pure ML-research profile with no backend depth.
- No big logos on CV.
- Unable to work on a B2B contract.

Preferred Attributes:
- Verifiable high-traffic/high-data-volume system ownership.
- Current, hands-on AI/LLM/agentic engineering work.
- A single long, deep staff-level ownership arc at one or two companies.

Avoid:
- Strong academic pedigree paired with light practical/production experience.
- Current primary role is training/consulting/advisory rather than hands-on IC engineering.
- Career reads as a sequence of short (<12 month) contract/interim stints without a clear staff-level ownership arc at any single organization.
- Single-language profiles; lack of polyglot experience.

Location: Remote - Poland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, Danmark, Hungary

Skills required for this job:

• AI/LLM engineering
• Back-end development