The Role
The R&D team is building the core product — not maintaining it. This role means taking features from requirements through to production, owning architectural decisions, and working with AI pipelines that are central to what the platform does, not bolted on as an afterthought. If you need a detailed spec to start writing code, this probably isn’t the right fit.
About the Product
The product is an email security platform focused on detecting and neutralising phishing and email-based threats in real time. The product sits in the inbox — processing, classifying, and responding to threats at scale using a combination of AI models and human analyst signals. The backend is the product: event processing, classification pipelines, and cloud-native architecture on AWS are where the real engineering work happens.
Technology Stack: Python on the backend, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch for data, AWS throughout — SQS, SNS, EKS, SES, S3. The team works with AI models and agentic tooling as core product components. Django, SQLAlchemy, and FastAPI are in use or in consideration. No exotic choices, no legacy debt called out — a reasonable modern Python/AWS setup doing non-trivial things with data and AI.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Design and implement backend services from scratch — greenfield features, not just tickets against an existing codebase
- Build and maintain AI-driven processing pipelines, including agentic workflows and integration with production LLM infrastructure
- Own the full development lifecycle: from shaping requirements with stakeholders to shipping and supporting production systems
- Design data models and queries across PostgreSQL and OpenSearch for both transactional and search-heavy workloads
- Work with AWS managed services (SQS, SNS, SES, S3, EKS) as first-class infrastructure components — not just deployment targets
- Contribute to cloud architecture decisions: how services communicate, scale, and degrade gracefully
- Hold quality as a constraint, not a phase — testing, observability, and maintainability are part of the definition of done
What We Expect
Must-have
- 6+ years of backend development experience, with at least 3–4 years in Python
- Proven track record designing and shipping scalable, production-grade systems
- Solid proficiency with both PostgreSQL and OpenSearch (or equivalent NoSQL)
- Hands-on experience working with AI models and agentic development patterns — not just calling an API
- Extensive AWS experience, including managed services (SQS, SNS, EKS, SES, S3)
- Experience writing services from scratch and taking ownership end-to-end
Nice to have
- Django, SQLAlchemy, or FastAPI in production
Why This Role Is Worth Your Time
- End-to-end ownership is explicit and real — you’re not implementing specs handed down from an architect. You shape the solution from the requirement
- AI and agentic development are central to the product, not a future roadmap item — you’ll work with these systems in production
- The domain is technically honest: email security at scale is a data and classification problem first, which means the engineering challenges are real
- This is an established product in its space — you’re building on a strong foundation, not chasing product-market fit from scratch
