Senior Backend Developer (Distributed Systems)

• The AI Systems team owns the core recommendations engine that powers billions of AI-driven marketing decisions daily across some of the world’s largest consumer brands
• As a Senior Backend Developer, you will lead the evolution of this system into a modern, scalable distributed architecture - one of the most impactful technical initiatives at Movable Ink
• This is an opportunity to do deep distributed systems work on a production system that directly drives revenue for our customers, while shaping the technical direction of a team working at the intersection of systems engineering and machine learning
• Lead the architectural evolution of the core recommendations pipeline to a modern distributed architecture, delivering incremental value while maintaining production stability
• Design, build, and operate scalable, fault-tolerant backend services that power personalization at scale across content selection, send-time optimization, subject line personalization, and frequency capping
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scaling limitations across the system
• Collaborate with ML engineers and product stakeholders to translate requirements into rigorous technical designs with a clear path to production
• Own key system components end-to-end - from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and incident response
• Champion engineering best practices around system design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence
• Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of technical rigor, ownership, and continuous improvement

Benefits

• Generous PTO
• Global Mental Health and Well-Being Benefits
• 401K Contribution
• Employee Resource Groups
• Volunteer Opportunities
• Social Events and Activities
• Flexible Work Opportunities
• Comprehensive Health Benefits
• Parental Leave and Support- Familiar with Software Development Lifecycle practices, such as continuous integration/continuous delivery and automated deployment (we use Docker, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions)
• Exemplary software engineering skills (system design, unit testing, git, code review, CI/CD)
• Experience with a cloud provider e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP (we use Google Cloud Platform)
• Exceptional problem-solving skills, including the ability to efficiently identify, analyze, and resolve complex issues in production systems
• A willingness and eagerness to continuously learn, adapt to evolving technologies, and strive for personal and professional improvement
• Strong technical leadership skills with the ability to collaborate effectively, advocate for sound architectural decisions, and mentor other engineers
• Experience with modern distributed and microservice technologies (we use Kubernetes, Kafka, and gRPC)
• Practical understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g. Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Apache Beam); hands-on Spark experience is a plus
• 5+ years software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems
• Strong foundation in Python
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent