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Mid LevelFull-timePythonKubernetesMySQLMongoDBREST APIGitGoAIML
Salary Range
$102,000 - $138,000 /year
This salary is estimated based on similar roles. The actual salary may vary.
About the Role
We are looking for a Backend Engineer to join the Core Platform team at Smallest.ai. This role involves building real-time voice systems that operate under strict constraints of latency, concurrency, cost, and reliability. The backend at Smallest.ai focuses on distributed systems, streaming pipelines, and production-first engineering.
Key Responsibilities
- →Design and build high-performance backend services for real-time AI workloads
- →Own APIs, streaming pipelines, queues, schedulers, and control planes
- →Build systems that handle high concurrency, backpressure, retries, and partial failures
- →Work with message brokers for event-driven and async architectures
- →Collaborate with ML, infra, and product teams to ship production-grade systems
- →Debug real-world issues such as latency spikes, message pileups, race conditions, and memory leaks
- →Make pragmatic trade-offs between latency, throughput, cost, and complexity
Requirements
- ✓Strong grasp of data structures, concurrency, and async systems
- ✓Clear understanding of how systems behave under load
- ✓Experience with Python, Go, Node, or TypeScript
- ✓Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases like MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Cassandra
- ✓Solid understanding of data modeling, consistency, indexing, and access patterns
- ✓Experience with SQL databases such as Postgres or MySQL
- ✓Practical experience with RabbitMQ and/or Kafka
- ✓Understanding of at-least-once vs exactly-once, consumer groups, partitions, and ordering
- ✓Knowledge of queues, workers, pub/sub, rate limiting, and idempotency
- ✓Strong on logging, metrics, observability, and debugging
- ✓Writes systems that are operable at scale, not just deployable
