Senior Backend Engineer

About Aivar Innovations

The Role

What Makes This Role Different

• Full ownership. You have built a platform or product architecture from the ground up and stayed accountable for it afterwards.
• Production accountability. You have run live systems, led performance investigations and owned incident response.
• Real scale. You have operated distributed systems that served 10,000+ users and know what changes in design as load grows.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture and ownership

• Own the Velogent platform architecture, technical roadmap and design decisions across all six pipeline stages, from ingestion to output.
• Write and maintain architecture decision records, capacity plans and reliability targets (SLOs) for the platform.
• Lead production operations: monitoring, on-call, incident response, root-cause analysis and performance tuning.

Pipeline and orchestration

• Design the core pipeline orchestration framework in async Python, supporting parallel and sequential stage execution with retries and dead-letter queues.
• Design the event-driven architecture with message queuing, backpressure handling and graceful degradation.
• Build the reconstruction module that turns extracted data into Markdown and vector representations and context maps.

Connectors, safety and compliance

• Build the connector framework for 50+ enterprise data sources (APIs, databases, file systems, SaaS platforms).
• Implement the safety layer: PII/PHI detection, data integrity checks, format compliance and input sanitisation.
• Implement an immutable audit trail across all six stages, recording every decision, action and transformation.
• Build multi-tenant data isolation so customer data stays strictly separated at every stage.

Engineering leadership

• Set engineering standards for testing, CI/CD, observability and code review. Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for the team.
• Partner with product, solution architects and customer delivery teams to turn customer requirements into platform capability.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 6 to 10 years of backend engineering experience, including 2+ years building data-intensive pipelines.
• Proven track record of designing and building a complete platform or product architecture and holding end-to-end ownership of it.
• Experience managing production systems, including diagnosing and resolving performance issues and leading incident response.
• Experience building and running distributed systems that supported 10,000+ users.
• Distributed Python systems: asyncio, aiohttp and Celery. This is not scripting.
• Message queues or streaming: Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ or Redis Streams.
• High-volume data pipelines handling 100K+ documents or records per batch.
• API design: REST or GraphQL, versioning, rate limiting and authentication.
• AWS: Lambda, SQS/SNS, MSK, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, S3, DynamoDB and RDS.
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture and customer data isolation patterns.
• Production habits: comprehensive testing, CI/CD, monitoring and incident response.

Good to Have

• Experience with PII/PHI handling or regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR).
• Vector databases, embeddings and retrieval pipelines for LLM or agentic workloads.
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform or CDK) and cost optimisation on AWS.
• Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a technical lead.

Core Tech Stack