Senior Backend Engineer / Architect

ImagineArt · Remote · Full-Time

About the role

We're a bootstrapped GenAI platform serving image and video generation at real scale — Fortune 500 clients, $35M+ ARR, and traffic that doesn't wait for you to catch up. We need a backend engineer who thinks in systems, not just services. You'll own the architecture behind our generation pipelines, inference orchestration, and the infrastructure that keeps latency low while volume climbs.

This is a hands-on architect role. You will design and write code, not just draw diagrams.

What you'll do

• Design and own backend systems that handle high-throughput, asynchronous workloads (generation queues, worker orchestration, media processing)

• Architect for scale and reliability — you'll make the calls on data flow, service boundaries, and failure handling

• Build and optimize async pipelines: job queuing, retries, backpressure, dead-letter handling, and everything that keeps millions of requests moving

• Improve performance and cost at the infrastructure level — inference is expensive, and efficiency is a product feature here

• Set technical direction and raise the engineering bar for the team through review and mentorship

What we're looking for

• Strong backend experience (5+ years) with real ownership of production systems at scale

• Proven system design skills — you can defend your architecture decisions with tradeoffs, not buzzwords

• Hands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar), and distributed workers

• Comfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environments

• Ability to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environment

Nice to have

• Experience with Go (or willingness to work in it — we lean on Go for backend)

• Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelines

• Track record contributing to open source (we look at GitHub signal)