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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 is backed by $60M in Series C funding and counts Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, and Zipline among its customers.
You'll join the Foundations team, the backend backbone responsible for building reliable, scalable, and fast systems that power the rest of the company. This team tackles deep distributed and data-intensive systems challenges with a long-term product mindset, planning around 6-, 12-, and 24-month horizons. The core problem: handling multiple orders of magnitude more data than today as Encord scales from 100 to 150+ engineers and beyond.
In this role, you'll take end-to-end ownership of significant projects within database and processing systems—from architectural design through deployment, monitoring, and impact measurement. You'll build robust distributed systems, reason carefully about failure modes and load behavior, contribute to performant protocols and APIs used directly by customers, and tackle complex domains with simple solutions. You'll also raise the bar through code reviews, pairing, and mentoring engineers around you.
You bring 5+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure, deep fluency in at least one high-level language (Python or TypeScript preferred), solid grounding in distributed systems concepts (databases, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching), and production ownership experience. Experience with data migrations or re-architecture is a plus. You're a builder who enjoys all aspects of shipping complete products, thinks from first principles, and reaches for the simplest solution that works. You thrive with autonomy, tackle ambiguous problems, and contribute to high-performing teams by doing your best work and helping others do theirs.
The tech stack includes Python (backend), TypeScript and React (frontend), Kubernetes (deployment), GCP (infrastructure), and PyTorch/CUDA/Ray (ML). The team works from the London office 4+ days per week. Benefits include competitive salary and equity, 25 days annual leave plus UK public holidays, learning & development budget, travel for customer visits and events, company lunches twice weekly, and monthly socials with bi-annual offsites.
