Senior Backend Engineer (IoT and Wearables)

About Us

Sapir AI is a Toronto-based robotics and AI startup building connected consumer hardware, including wearables and smart home devices. We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own the systems behind our connected devices, from data pipelines to AI infrastructure. You'll work with high autonomy, taking full ownership from design to production.

Responsibilities

• Backend systems handling real-time device data (video, sensor, and AI inference events) at scale
• Edge-to-cloud AI pipelines and third-party machine learning inference integrations
• Privacy-first storage and retention, with on-device processing where possible
• Event-streaming, alerting, and subscription billing infrastructure

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience; Python required
• SQL and NoSQL databases (Postgres, DynamoDB/MongoDB)
• AWS/GCP and streaming infrastructure (IoT Core/Kinesis), Firebase (storage, messaging)
• API design at scale: REST/gRPC, plus MQTT and/or Kafka
• Video/audio/binary data pipelines
• CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment), Docker/Kubernetes, staging/deployment/scaling tooling

Nice to Have

• Production machine learning/large language model inference infrastructure (managed model APIs, vLLM, Triton, or similar)
• Consumer IoT (Internet of Things)/wearables experience, or any machine learning application with real production traffic
• On-device/edge machine learning or privacy-preserving architecture experience

Soft Skills

• Adaptable and comfortable with fast iteration as the product evolves
• Pragmatic about scale. Builds for today, while understanding where to maintain flexibility to future-proof for growth
• Collaborative across hardware, firmware, and mobile teams