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Encord is the universal data layer for AI, indexing, curating, annotating and evaluating multimodal data across the full AI lifecycle for 300+ AI teams including Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath and Zipline. The company is a Series C startup backed by CRV and Y Combinator, with 150+ people across London, San Francisco and New York.
You'll join Foundations, the backend backbone of Encord, building the reliable, scalable, fast systems that every other team and customer runs on. The work sits deep in distributed and data-intensive systems: storage, indexing, querying and processing multimodal data at a scale few companies reach. AI teams are generating video, images, 3D sensor data and documents faster than existing systems can keep up, and you'll help redesign core infrastructure for the next 100x of scale.
In this role, you will own significant projects in data systems end to end: design, architecture, deployment, monitoring and measuring impact. You'll build distributed systems that stay fast and correct under load, reason carefully about failure modes, shape performant protocols and APIs that customers build directly on top of, and find simple solutions to complex domains at scale. You'll raise the bar for everyone around you through code reviews, pairing and knowledge sharing.
The timing is rare—the team has grown from 100 to 150+ in a year and is still accelerating, driven by massive demand. You'll have real ownership of whole systems, not tickets, with architectural decisions yours to make. Your work will power 300+ AI teams, and the team plans 24 months out, giving you room to build things properly.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Fluency in at least one high-level language (Python, Typescript) and one imperative statically typed language (Rust, C++, Java, Go, or other)
- Solid grounding in distributed systems concepts (databases, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching, consistency) and how they behave under load
- Deep understanding of CS fundamentals, data structures and algorithms
- Experience owning services in production and improving quality through code reviews, testing, rollout and monitoring
- Demonstrated experience developing and maintaining multiple systems from scratch, understanding trade-offs in building reliable, performant software at speed
- Ability to combine rigorous engineering with ruthless prioritization to ship efficient and correct systems quickly
- Comfort tackling problems without predefined, clear definitions or obvious solutions, with autonomy to make decisions as you go
