Senior Backend Engineer

Position:

Senior Backend Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain

  Fast API-based backend services

  for Smart Learns MVP.
• Design and optimize

  low-latency APIs

  supporting real-time lesson flows, tutor responses, and auto-grading feedback.
• Implement

  real-time RAG pipelines

  with ingestion (Playwright, Firecrawl, web scraping) and semantic retrieval (Pinecone, FAISS).
• Manage

  file ingestion workflows

  (PDFs, OCR, Firecrawl) with preprocessing and chunking pipelines.
• Build caching and persistence layers (

  Redis, Postgres extensions, hybrid vector DB storage

  ).
• Design

  secure, multi-tenant backend architectures

  supporting globally distributed learners and multimodal inputs (text, code, image, voice).
• Optimize and scale

  semantic search infrastructure

  (Pinecone, Redis, Postgres) for speed and accuracy.
• Support

  graph-based querying and learner knowledge graph updates

  .
• Manage

  LLM orchestration pipelines

  (prompting, caching, failover, evaluation harnesses).
• Deploy and monitor

  production-grade LLM endpoints

  (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Bedrock).
• Ensure

  observability

  (logging, monitoring, alerting with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Guarantee

  global scalability

  with autoscaling, load balancing, and failover-ready infrastructure.
• Collaborate with frontend/UI and AI leads to integrate APIs, agents, and sandbox flows.
  
• Support

  real-time streaming APIs

  for AI tutor chat/voice and sandbox grading.
• Drive

  efficiency, throughput, and cost optimization

  across infrastructure.
• Daily use of

  AI coding copilots

  (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) to accelerate velocity and testing.
• Partner with AI Lead to ensure

  latency, scaling, and security compliance targets

  are met.

Required Skills

• 6+ years

  of backend engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with

  production-grade AI/LLM systems

  .
• Strong fluency with

  AI coding copilots

  (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor).

• Python (FastAPI)

  backend development.
• RAG pipeline development (

  Playwright, Firecrawl, Puppeteer

  ).
• Vector databases (

  Pinecone, FAISS

  ).

• Redis, Postgres

  , and hybrid storage optimization.

• Low-latency optimization

  (async APIs, streaming, caching).
• Cloud experience:

  AWS/GCP

  (Lambda, S3, RDS, autoscaling, monitoring).
• Observability with

  Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry

  .
• Containerization and orchestration (

  Docker, Kubernetes: EKS/GKE

  ).
• Strong

  CI/CD practices

  .
• Security and authentication (

  OAuth, SSO

  ).
• Startup mindset with

  ownership and async remote communication

  skills.
• Prior

  AI-native project experience

  is a must.

Preferred (Bonus) Skills

• Experience with

  OCR pipelines

  .
• Knowledge of

  graph-based querying and knowledge graph updates

  .
• Hands-on with

  multimodal data processing

  (text, code, image, voice).