Senior Backend Engineer - Python

You’ll be responsible for the technical backbone of our product-shaping architecture decisions, evolving production systems, and setting the engineering standard as our team grows:

• Define and evolve our backend architecture-making strategic decisions on service boundaries, data flows, and scaling patterns.
• Design and build high-throughput content ingestion and transformation pipelines that reliably process thousands of articles daily.
• Own the full lifecycle of our core API services (FastAPI)-from design through deployment to operational excellence.
• Establish backend engineering standards: code quality, testing strategies, documentation practices, and review processes.
• Drive infrastructure decisions-evaluate trade-offs between cloud services, optimize costs, and ensure our systems are observable and resilient.
• Mentor and guide future engineering hires as the team scales., How we define success:
• You’ve established architectural patterns and engineering practices that the team builds on confidently.
• The systems you own run reliably in production with clear observability-issues are caught before users notice.
• Your technical judgment earns trust across the team, and your decisions hold up as we scale.
• Editors and internal users experience a noticeably more stable, faster product.

Why us?

• Shape the technical foundation of a product used by major German publishers.
• Be the senior engineering voice in a small, high-impact team with direct influence on product and architecture.
• Support trustworthy journalism in the age of AI.
• Berlin-based hybrid setup with genuine home office flexibility.
• Early-stage equity opportunity-your work directly drives company value.

• 5+ years of professional Python development, with significant experience designing and operating production backend systems
• Deep knowledge of async frameworks (FastAPI or equivalent) and RESTful API design
• Strong data modeling skills-MongoDB or other document/NoSQL databases at scale
• Solid understanding of distributed systems patterns: queues, event-driven architectures, idempotency, graceful degradation

AI & Platform:

• Hands-on experience integrating and orchestrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) in production
• Familiarity with LangSmith, LangChain, or comparable orchestration/observability tooling
• Ability to reason about prompt engineering trade-offs, token economics, and model selection
• Up to date and clear on pros and cons of agent-assisted software developement

DevOps & Infrastructure:

• Production AWS experience (ECS, Lambda, S3, SQS, or similar services)
• Docker, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), infrastructure-as-code
• Hands-on with monitoring, logging, and alerting-you’ve been on-call and know what matters when things break

How You Work:

• You think in systems, not just features-anticipating failure modes and scaling bottlenecks before they hit
• You make pragmatic trade-offs between moving fast and building for durability
• You communicate technical decisions clearly, both in writing and in conversation
• You’ve operated in environments where you had to define process, not just follow it
• You love to deploy as often as you can and to test in production

Experience in early-stage or high-growth startups is a strong plus. You excel at taking ownership, handling ambiguity, and understand that sometimes you have to throw away your own code.

BeatSquares transforms large content archives into new formats to reach audiences. A single story can now reach everyone. Our mission is to bring trusted journalistic information and factual content exactly where people need it-through a scalable, modern platform.