Backend Python Engineer / Architect

THE ROLE

Our organization is looking for an experienced Backend Python Engineer & Systems Architect to join our technology team. This position is ideal for a seasoned professional looking to make a significant contribution to both our company and the open source community. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and implementing complex backend services. We’re looking for someone with not just backend programming experience, but designing them in an highly-scalable fashion, and can take a step back and look at the bigger picture as an architect and see how any individual service will play out on a larger scale and how it’ll interact with other services.

The successful candidate will be proficient in Python and have demonstrable experience designing, developing, and deploying scalable & highly available services. We expect you to have a deep understanding of performance, multi-threading, data modeling, and distributed systems. An intimate knowledge of distributed microservice architecture will be critical in this role, as the development and maintenance of these services will form a significant part of your responsibilities.

A substantial part of your role will involve developing and maintaining services intended to be run in a Kubernetes environment. As such, knowledge and experience in Kubernetes and containerization are essential. The ideal individual will need to understand how to write robust, resilient applications that can effectively scale and respond to changing conditions in a cloud-based, containerized environment. They will have multiple experiences as such and be able to explain in detail the challenges they’ve had in this space before and how to navigate around them.

In addition to technical skills we are seeking a candidate who thrives in a collaborative environment. Excellent communication skills are key as you will be expected to interface with various teams and individuals within the organization and potentially external partners, being able to translate business needs into effective technology solutions will be crucial. We are looking for someone who is driven and motivated and is able to carry projects both on their own and with others.

If you are a passionate Python professional with a strong background in backend development, systems architecture, microservices, and Kubernetes, we would like to meet you. This role promises not only technical challenges but also the opportunity to shape the future direction of our technology stack and services. With MindsDB, you will have the chance to bring and expand your skills, face unique challenges, and make a real impact on our business and your future. We have a number of talented and experienced individuals in both the ML/AI space and in the high-scalability space, so there is room for professional growth and tutoring from your fellow staff as well as the opportunity to teach others.

Locale: This is preferably an hybrid role located in the Bay Area or at least in the West Coast of the USA time zone (PST). We prefer a candidate able to come into the office a few days/week which is located in the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco. If not local, we would consider someone who can regularly come visit (eg: 1 week out of every month) and work in the office.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Engineering new microservices from the ground up for specific purpose-fit solutions
• Modifying existing services to perform in a higher-scalability capacity. Experienced with various fan-out patterns, queueing systems, etc.
• Migrating some services from a monolith to a scalable microservice pattern
• Devising solutions from a set of requirements
• Collaborating with team members or other industry professionals or partners about possible requirements, solutions, and deciding a path forward together
• Implementing that solution either on your own, or on larger projects with a team of engineers some which may be remote.
• You may be asked to manage your project and any resources (engineers, testers, staff) assigned to your project
• Having shared responsibility for our suite of services, infrastructure, uptime, and quality of our product
• Contributing to an open-source project

YOU WILL HAVE

• 5+ years of industry experience working with Python (or comparable experience)
• 5+ years engineering backend/API/microservices (or comparable experience)
• Knowledge of and experience with designing highly-scalable microservices
• Deep knowledge of Docker, containerization, Kubernetes/docker orchestration
• Experience working in a team-based environment, in an agile workflow
• Interest and desire to learn in all items mentioned in “Nice to have” below on the job

NICE TO HAVE

• Knowledge of and experience with Machine Learning / AI tools, technologies, concepts and frameworks
• Knowledge of Grafana, Prometheus, ElasticSearch/Kibana to assist with debugging
• Experience with kubectl, capable to debug services deployed into Kubernetes
• Experience with helm, capable to modify/improve/deploy services into Kubernetes
• Experience with our open-source library, MindsDB
• Experience working with Open-Source projects, ideally having contributed and/or authored code to various projects. Understanding what is necessary to successfully contribute
• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure
• Experience with doing tracing and performance auditing and improvements to code and services