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Similarweb is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to build distributed services, data access layers, and agent orchestration systems powering AI-driven analytics products. The role combines deep backend and distributed systems expertise with product thinking and AI tool proficiency.
You will design and build scalable backend services in Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, asyncio) and TypeScript (NestJS/Node.js), owning API design, contracts, and versioning across services including tool surfaces (MCP) that AI agents call directly. You'll design and optimize data models, schemas, and query performance across transactional (PostgreSQL) and large-scale analytical stores (Firebolt, Athena, DuckDB). Your responsibilities include building asynchronous, long-running execution systems using durable workflow orchestration (Temporal), queues, scheduled jobs, and event-driven processing.
You will integrate LLM and agent runtimes (LangGraph, MCP, model APIs) into production services behind deterministic, testable boundaries. You'll implement authentication, authorization, and secure service-to-service integration patterns across an internal service mesh, and build resilient upstream data-fetching layers with timeouts, retries, caching strategies, and graceful degradation.
Leadership responsibilities include driving backend technical decisions, code quality standards, and system architecture. You'll ensure system scalability, fault tolerance, and observability through structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting. You own services end-to-end in production: CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments to Kubernetes, and production debugging. You'll partner with frontend engineers on API contracts and performance budgets, translate product requirements into robust technical solutions, conduct high-quality code reviews, and improve testing across the pyramid. You'll use AI coding tools effectively (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) in daily development, critically evaluating and refining AI-generated code, especially for backend logic and data integrity.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production services at scale
- Strong proficiency in Python (FastAPI or equivalent async framework) or Node.js/TypeScript (NestJS), with willingness to work in both
- Experience designing scalable backend architectures with clear service boundaries and durable data models
- Deep understanding of API design, authentication/authorization flows, and distributed system tradeoffs
- Strong command of async and concurrent programming, and long-running/distributed execution (workflow engines, queues, schedulers)
- Experience with relational and/or analytical databases: schema design, migrations, query optimization
- Track record of optimizing queries and costs over large datasets (PostgreSQL at scale, or OLAP/columnar engines like Athena, Firebolt, BigQuery, Snowflake, ClickHouse)
- Strong understanding of system performance, reliability, and security best practices
- Experience with testing methodologies (unit, integration, E2E) and observability tooling (metrics, structured logs, distributed tracing)
- Comfort owning the runtime: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines
- Production experience integrating LLM or model APIs into backend services, treating latency, failure modes, cost, and non-deterministic output as engineering problems
- Hands-on experience using AI development tools in daily workflows with ability to validate, debug, and improve AI-generated code
- Understanding of prompt engineering for engineering workflows and ability to work in fast iteration environments
- Strong product and technical intuition with excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Enough frontend fluency (React, TypeScript) to reason about API consumption
- Nice to have: agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain), Model Context Protocol, durable workflow engines (Temporal, Airflow, Step Functions), data platforms, analytics products, or BI tools
