Senior Software Engineer - Backend

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more.

We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Engineer to join our Foundations team, the backend backbone that builds the reliable, scalable, fast systems everyone else at Encord builds on top of. The team's core challenges sit deep in distributed and data-intensive systems.

The product mindset on this team is different from most of the company: short-term product insight matters less, long-term matters a lot. Foundations plans around how the next 6, 12, and 24 months will look, with an overarching shape to the problem: handling multiple orders of magnitude the data we handle today.

Encord is growing rapidly, with our product as the key driver of that growth. A year ago, we were a team of 100; now, we're over 150 and continuing to accelerate. The systems that got us here won't get us to what's next. That's the problem you'll help solve.

What you'll do

• Take end-to-end ownership of significant projects within our database and processing systems, from design and architectural decisions all the way to deployment, monitoring, and measuring impact

• Build robust distributed systems and reason carefully about how they fail and how they behave under load

• Contribute to performant protocols and APIs, such as our label-format API, that customers use directly

• Tackle complex domains and immense scale with simple solutions

• Raise the bar through code reviews, pairing, and helping engineers around you do their best work

Who we're looking for

• You've seen and built a lot. You have personally developed and maintained multiple systems from scratch, and you know what trade-offs are involved in building reliable, performant software at speed

• You want your work to have a tangible outcome for people. You're not satisfied with building products that do not see the light of day

• You are a builder. You enjoy all aspects of building not only software but