SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Encord is a universal data layer for AI, helping 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. The platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle. The company has raised $60M in Series C funding and is trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, and Zipline.
You'll join the Foundations team, the backend backbone responsible for building reliable, scalable, fast systems that the rest of the company depends on. This is Encord's most senior individual contributor role, focused on distributed and data-intensive systems challenges.
Key responsibilities include designing and leading major database and processing-system initiatives; designing performant protocols and APIs that customers use directly; building robust distributed systems with rigorous understanding of failure modes and load behavior; and leveling up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship.
You'll own the hardest architectural decisions, make trade-offs that shape the platform for years, and raise the engineering bar company-wide. The Foundations team plans around 6, 12, and 24-month horizons with an overarching challenge: handling multiple orders of magnitude more data than today. Encord is growing rapidly—from 100 to 150+ people in a year—and the systems that got the company here won't scale to what's next.
Required experience: 10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure; several years at staff/principal level with company-wide technical influence; deep expertise in distributed systems (databases, processing, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching); experience leading large-scale data migrations and re-architecture projects with real customer data; production reliability and operations ownership (monitoring, alerting, DevOps/SRE); track record of raising engineering quality through architecture reviews, code reviews, testing, and monitoring practices; demonstrated ability to influence without authority in fast-moving, low-process environments.
Tech stack: Python (backend), TypeScript and React (frontend), Kubernetes (deployment), GCP (infrastructure), PyTorch, CUDA, Ray (ML). The company is technology-agnostic and values learning ability.
The role is based in London with 4+ days/week in-office expectation. Benefits include competitive salary, meaningful equity, 25 days annual leave plus UK public holidays, learning & development budget, travel for customer visits and conferences, company lunches twice weekly, and monthly socials with bi-annual team offsites.
