Software Engineer, Backend Development (Python)

Role Overview

As a Backend Engineer, you will design and develop reliable, secure, and performant backend systems that power Kensho’s AI products. You will build APIs and orchestration layers that integrate with ML systems, support complex retrieval workflows, and deliver grounded, verifiable results to customers at scale. You will work across backend systems that power Kensho’s GenAI platform, Data Retrieval Agents, and the application architecture behind established foundational AI toolkits.

Responsibilities

• Build High-Quality Backend Systems: Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services and APIs that power Kensho’s AI applications, ensuring they are reliable, secure, and performant.
• Develop Retrieval and Orchestration Services: Create APIs and services that orchestrate data retrieval workflows, integrate with ML systems, and support grounded, verifiable outputs for GenAI (LLM based) applications.
• Collaborate closely with colleagues across Product, Machine Learning, Infrastructure, Design, and other Application engineers.
• Help define architecture, enforce sound engineering practices, and ensure AI-driven applications remain robust, maintainable, and performant.

Requirements

• 3+ years of direct experience developing customer-facing APIs within a team.
• Experience developing RESTful APIs using a variety of tools.
• Experience working across many stages of the software development lifecycle.
• Sound reasoning about the behavior and performance of loosely-coupled systems.
• Proficiency with algorithms, data structures, and software architecture.
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and tools.
• Experience with containerization technologies like Docker or Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of distributed system concepts, concurrency, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience building and scaling high-volume, low-latency backend services.
• Hands-on experience with messaging, task queues, or workflow systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Celery.
• Experience deploying and operating backend systems on a major cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• Experience with observability tools including metrics, tracing, and structured logging.

Skills

• Python
• AWS
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Kafka