This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer – Data Core based in Italy.
This is a senior backend engineering role focused on building the infrastructure that powers a large-scale creator data platform. You’ll design and operate systems responsible for collecting and maintaining data on more than 400 million creator profiles across major social platforms. The role involves solving complex distributed-systems challenges around reliability, freshness, scalability, external dependencies, and cost efficiency. You’ll have end-to-end ownership, from shaping ambiguous problems and designing architectures to deploying, monitoring, and continuously improving production systems. You’ll work with high-volume data, third-party APIs, proxy networks, and cloud infrastructure where small technical improvements can have a significant business impact. The environment is remote-first, async-oriented, collaborative, and designed to give senior engineers substantial autonomy.
Accountabilities:
- Build and evolve backend systems responsible for collecting and maintaining 400M+ creator profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
- Develop reliable collection infrastructure capable of processing billions of data points while maintaining appropriate levels of freshness, coverage, and data quality.
- Design resilient services that can handle third-party API instability, rate limits, provider outages, platform changes, partial failures, and other external disruptions.
- Improve the economics of large-scale data collection by optimizing requests, proxy usage, retries, storage, compute, and other infrastructure costs.
- Design and maintain systems that determine which creators should be collected, when they should be collected, and how frequently, balancing customer value with operational cost.
- Own backend systems throughout their lifecycle, including requirements gathering, architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, operation, and iteration.
- Build strong observability, alerting, monitoring, and operational safeguards to identify collection failures, data-quality issues, coverage gaps, and freshness regressions before they affect customers.
- Work closely with data, search, product, and engineering teams to establish reliable interfaces and dependencies between systems.
- Evaluate technical approaches through production experiments, considering throughput, failure modes, scalability, reliability, and unit economics before making larger investments.
- Contribute to engineering standards, architecture decisions, code reviews, and technical direction across production-critical infrastructure.
Requirements:
- Proven experience building large-scale backend or data systems where reliability, throughput, latency, scalability, and cost are important considerations.
- Demonstrated ability to take systems from concept to production, including scoping, architecture, implementation, release, operation, measurement, and continuous improvement.
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems and the ability to reason about partial failures, retries, idempotency, backpressure, scaling, fault tolerance, and operational tradeoffs.
- Experience building and maintaining integrations with third-party APIs or external dependencies that may be rate-limited, unreliable, or subject to frequent changes.
- Practical experience with proxy management, request routing, or high-volume traffic management is valuable, including an understanding of the challenges associated with anti-bot systems and responsible large-scale traffic handling.
- Strong operational ownership, with experience using observability, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and data-quality controls to keep production systems reliable after deployment.
- Ability to work autonomously on ambiguous technical challenges, gather requirements, identify the right questions, and move projects forward without needing fully defined specifications.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly, provide constructive feedback, and work effectively across teams.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, and strong proficiency with backend technologies such as TypeScript and Node.js.
- Familiarity with databases, queues, object storage, infrastructure as code, and distributed cloud services.
- Bonus experience with social-media APIs, large-scale data collection, data-quality frameworks, or freshness and coverage monitoring.
- Interest in the creator economy or social platforms is a plus, but prior industry experience is not required.
Benefits:
- Competitive compensation: Annual salary range of €80,000–€110,000, plus stock options. The exact package depends on location, employment type, skills, and experience.
- Meaningful equity: Stock options designed to provide employees with meaningful ownership as the organization grows.
- Fully remote in Europe: Work from wherever you do your best work, with some overlap with GMT+3.
- Flexible working hours: The focus is on outcomes and impact rather than fixed working schedules.
- Unlimited paid vacation: Take the time you need to rest, recharge, and maintain a sustainable work-life balance.
- Personal development support: Courses, books, conferences, and other learning opportunities are supported when they contribute to your growth.
- Real ownership: Take production-critical infrastructure from initial concept through deployment and operation without unnecessary layers of process.
- Regular offsites: Connect with colleagues in person through recurring company gatherings while maintaining a remote-first working model.
- Deep-work environment: Purposeful meetings, focused collaboration, and plenty of time for designing, building, hardening, and operating systems.
- Modern technical stack: Work with AWS, Pulumi, TypeScript, Node.js, Aurora Limitless/Postgres, S3, CloudWatch, ECS, SQS, Athena, proxy networks, and custom routing infrastructure.
- Fast interview process: The hiring process is designed to move quickly and can be completed in under a week, with an introductory conversation, coding interview, system design interview, team interview, and final culture and alignment conversation.