Senior Backend Software Engineer

About the role

MediaViz builds digital media intelligence solutions and novel content perception models that help machines understand and evaluate the relationships between photos, videos, and audio at scale. We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own the backend systems and infrastructure that ingest media, orchestrate model inference, process results, and deliver structured outputs to customers.

You won't be training models in this role, but you'll have primary responsibility for the environments in which they run and a distributed I/O pipeline that processes large, highly bursty workloads with high reliability requirements. To that end, we're looking for someone who has personally owned backend systems that other teams and customers relied on.

Responsibilities:

Own the backend architecture and services supporting MediaViz's production media intelligence platform.

Design and maintain the end-to-end media processing pipeline, from client upload through job orchestration, model inference, result aggregation, persistence, and delivery.

Build and operate distributed inference infrastructure for containerized machine learning services using queue-driven asynchronous processing and workload-based scaling.

Design systems for bursty workloads, including concurrency control, backpressure, retries, idempotency, failure recovery, and dead-letter handling.

Design, build, and maintain REST APIs and associated client SDKs.

Own the application data layer, including PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS and OpenSearch-based search and retrieval systems.

Maintain semantic search infrastructure using embeddings and Amazon Bedrock.

Manage application deployments and production infrastructure across development, staging, and production environments.

Maintain logging, monitoring, alerting, and operational visibility for production systems.

Diagnose performance, scalability, and reliability issues across distributed services.

Maintain infrastructure as code and contribute to CI/CD, security, access control, and production readiness practices.

Establish and maintain appropriate automated testing for backend services and infrastructure.

Participate in architecture decisions and technical planning for backend and infrastructure systems.

Required Qualifications:

5+ years of professional backend software development experience, with substantial production experience in Python.

Demonstrated ownership of production backend systems used by customers or other engineering teams.

Strong experience designing and operating asynchronous or distributed processing systems.

Experience building systems around message queues, including idempotency, retries, backpressure, failure handling, and dead-letter queues.

Deep production experience with AWS, including: Lambda, including container-image functions, SQS, S3, RDS/PostgreSQL, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudFront

Experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform or CloudFormation.

Strong Docker experience and practical experience deploying containerized production workloads.

Experience deploying and serving machine learning models in production environments.

Experience designing and maintaining REST APIs.

Strong PostgreSQL experience, including schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations, and production operations.

Experience implementing production monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident diagnosis.

Familiarity with CI/CD and automated testing for production backend systems.

Strong understanding of cloud security fundamentals, particularly IAM, secrets management, least-privilege access, and network boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications:

Vector search, semantic search, or embedding-based retrieval systems.

Kubernetes or another container orchestration platform.

Kubeflow or similar machine learning infrastructure.

API Gateway WebSocket APIs and DynamoDB.

Experience with high-throughput media ingestion or processing systems.

Experience with computer vision, machine learning inference, or media processing workloads.

Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure for both burst capacity and idle cost efficiency.

Role Details:

Reports to: CTO

Location: Remote

Work authorization: Candidates must already have authorization to work in the United States for any employer. MediaViz is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship for this role.