Location: Fully Remote
Preferred Time Zones: GMT+1 or CST
Reports To: VP of Engineering
Team: Platform / CrossâProduct Initiatives
Weâre a rapidly growing SEO software company and fullâservice digital agency helping websites improve their Google performance. From Fortune 500 companies to Silicon Valley startups, our clients trust us to drive results.
Weâre hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to drive crossâproduct technical initiatives across our SEO intelligence platform. This is a handsâon technical leadership role focused on solving complex problems, hardening and scaling core systems, and elevating engineering standards across multiple product teams.
Youâll partner directly with senior leadership (VP Eng, PM, DevOps) to architect and evolve backend foundations that impact every service in our ecosystem. Youâll also play a key role in our hiring barâinterviewing and calibrating Lead Backend Engineer candidates for new product pods.
Important: Weâre seeking a proven Principal (not a âstepâupâ). You should have already operated at Principal scope and pace in a highâvelocity environment.Lead platformâwide initiatives and scalable architecture design across multiple services and product lines.
Own technical direction alongside the VP Eng: system design, coding standards, performance practices, and platform consistency.
Architect and evolve Django REST, Celery, and PostgreSQL systems for scalability, reliability, and data integrity.
Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, code reviews, technical deep dives, and periodic audits.
Drive observability and performance optimization using Sentry, Datadog, Grafana; partner with DevOps to standardize tracing/monitoring/alerting.
Champion production readiness : robust testing, CI/CD, rollout/rollback strategies, SLOs/SLIs, and incident response playbooks.
Evaluate and introduce technologies that deliver measurable technical or business value (with clear adoption guidelines).
Collaborate crossâfunctionally with Product and QA to deliver endâtoâend excellence across pods.
Influence hiring : participate in interviewing Lead Backend Engineers and setting the technical bar.
Ramp fast: meaningfully deliver code within 2 weeks ; establish credibility across teams.
Stabilize and scale at least one crossâproduct pathway (e.g., ingestion â processing â analytics) with measurable latency/cost/quality wins.
Codify standards for API design, async processing, and data access that pods can adopt consistently.
8+ years with Python 3 and Django REST Framework (including at least 1 year employed at Principal level , nonânegotiable).
Deep understanding of Django internals , ORM optimization, REST API design, and distributed/asynchronous architectures with Celery .
Strong PostgreSQL expertise (schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations at scale).
Proven experience designing/operating multiâservice or microservice systems.
Production experience with observability stacks (Sentry, Datadog, Grafana) and modern CI/CD .
Comfortable with Gitâbased workflows ( GitLab preferred).
Exceptional communication skills : able to explain complex, dataâheavy SaaS systems to technical and nonâtechnical stakeholders.
Startupâready: thrive in a highâvelocity environment; comfortable shipping iteratively (weâve shipped products in < 7 weeks ).
Experience with ClickHouse or Elasticsearch for largeâscale analytics/search.
Familiarity with OpenAPI or DRF Spectacular .
Working knowledge of Kubernetes (DevOps owns infra; familiarity is valuable).
Understanding of caching strategies , profiling tools, and async patterns at scale.
Interest in developer experience improvements (tooling, automation, templates).
15 Days Paid Time Off + Christmas Day + New Yearâs Day paid.
Equity potential after demonstrating outcomes; tied to a planned RPO within ~2 years.
Fully Remote â work from anywhere .
Collaboration across pods works best from GMT+1 or CST time zones (preferred but not strictly required).