Backend Engineer

We are looking for a strong, product-minded Senior Backend Engineer to help us evolve a complex, high-load system in the life sciences domain. You will work on real-world problems that require thoughtful design, careful trade-offs, and a balance between delivery speed and long-term sustainability. We value engineers who think beyond tickets, take ownership of outcomes, and actively shape both product and architecture.

We value engineers who are:

• Inventive, pragmatic, and curious
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity
• Committed to building excellent engineering culture
• Eager to grow professionally within a strong and collaborative team

We follow agile practices, own our processes, and continuously evolve with our product.

This role offers:

• Complex technical challenges in a meaningful scientific domain
• High ownership and real impact on product and technical direction
• Hands-on implementation of new features
• The opportunity to shape product architecture and influence long-term technical decisions
• The opportunity to work on a product that handles petabytes of biological data
• Adapting and evolving APIs to meet the demands of AI/ML-driven use cases
• An engineering-driven culture with pragmatic decision-making
• Room to grow technically and take on increasingly ambitious challenges

ODM is evolving to support modern AI/ML pipelines in drug discovery. You’ll help shape APIs and infrastructure that enable our platform to integrate seamlessly with current and future AI-driven workloads.

Currently, our bets are placed on Java, Kotlin, ClickHouse, MySQL, Solr, Kubernetes, and Python, but we’re eager to adapt and innovate. If you feel this resonates with you, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

In this role, you will:

• Take end-to-end ownership of backend features, from refining requirements with Product to delivering robust production-ready solutions
• Proactively challenge and improve product and technical decisions
• Evolve the system core, APIs, and data layer
• Optimize performance, scalability, and reliability under demanding workloads
• Balance fast product increments with sustainable technical architecture

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong backend focus
• Deep understanding of CS fundamentals (OOP, algorithms, data structures)
• Extensive experience with data storages: RDBMS, columnar databases, search engines and other NoSQL technologies
• Proven experience in agentic engineering
• Strong proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin
• Experience with system-level refactoring
• Strong experience with Spring and the Spring ecosystem
• Ability to detect and resolve performance bottlenecks
• Ability to learn quickly in complex domains
• Interest in life sciences, data science, and ML/AI applications
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Fluent English

It would be nice if you have:

• Knowledge of biology and genetics
• Experience with profiling, tracing, and performance tools
• Familiarity with Python