Senior Backend / AI Architect

We are seeking a senior backend engineer with at least eight years of professional experience designing and building scalable backend systems. The ideal candidate will have expert-level proficiency in Python, preferably with FastAPI, and extensive experience developing REST APIs, WebSockets, OAuth, JWT authentication, and microservices-based architectures. You should possess strong database expertise, including PostgreSQL, Redis, SQL optimization, database design, and data modeling. A solid background in cloud infrastructure is required, including Docker, Docker Compose, AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, S3-compatible object storage, CI/CD pipelines, and Linux server administration. Candidates should also have extensive experience designing distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, background job processing, queue systems, caching, high availability, scalability, and performance optimization. Experience integrating production AI services is highly desirable, including one or more of the following: OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini APIs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), AI orchestration frameworks, prompt engineering, structured AI outputs, embeddings, and vector databases. We strongly prefer candidates who have built AI-powered SaaS platforms, event-driven systems, real-time analytics platforms, mobile backends, security platforms, device management systems, high-volume APIs, media processing pipelines, OCR systems, speech-to-text systems, computer vision pipelines, notification systems, or cloud-native applications. Additional experience with technologies such as LangGraph or similar workflow orchestration frameworks, Qdrant, Milvus or Pinecone, OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, Celery, Kafka or RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, Nginx, and Cloudflare is a significant advantage. In this role, you will architect and lead development of our cloud API platform, authentication services, device registration, event ingestion, policy synchronization, notification infrastructure, AI integration layer, media processing pipeline, OCR and speech processing pipelines, background worker infrastructure, cloud storage architecture, analytics platform, reporting services, and monitoring and logging systems. The ideal candidate is an experienced systems architect who enjoys building scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable platforms, thinks in terms of long-term architecture rather than individual features, and has a proven track record of designing systems capable of scaling from thousands to millions of users while thriving in a fast-paced startup environment.