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 a complete product, and are comfortable moving across the stack when necessary - You enjoy problem-solving and thinking from first principles, reach for the simplest solution that works, and know when boring technology wins - You're happy to tackle problems without a predefined, clear definition or obvious solution, and are excited to have autonomy to make decisions as you go - You understand that being a member of a high-performing team requires two things. You contribute your best work and help others contribute their best. You'll always lend a helping hand when needed and level up those around you EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS - 5+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure applications - Deep fluency in at least one high-level language (we use Python and TypeScript, but we care more about depth than the specific language) - Solid grounding in distributed systems concepts (databases, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching) and how they behave under load - Experience owning services in production and improving quality through code reviews, testing, rollout, and monitoring - Experience with data migrations or re-architecture projects is a plus TECH STACK We are technology-agnostic at Encord and are not looking for experience across all of these. As long as you're open to learning, please apply. - Backend: Python - Frontend: TypeScript and React - Deployment: Kubernetes - Infrastructure: GCP - Machine learning: PyTorch, CUDA, Ray WHY ENCORD - Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup - Strong in-person culture: the team works from our London office 4+ days/week - 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays - Annual learning & development budget - Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe - Daily company lunches - Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites