Python Developer

Here are two tailored versions of the Job Description depending on the exact hiring angle you want to emphasize: Option 1: Tech-First & Direct (Best for engineering job boards like LinkedIn, Wellfound, or Hacker News where candidates appreciate clear, unfiltered expectations up front). Option 2: Executive & Corporate (Best for company career sites, enterprise platforms, or third-party recruiting agencies). Option 1: Tech-First & Direct (Recommended) Senior Backend Engineer (Python & Distributed Systems) Location: [City / Hybrid / Remote] Experience Level: 36 Years Employment Type: Full-time About the Role & Ownership Bar This is not a traditional staff-augmentation or ticket-taker role. The explicit expectation from our engineering leadership is equal, end-to-end ownership alongside the in-house team . You will hold the exact same bar and accountability as internal engineers across every phase of software delivery: driving core design decisions, debugging live production issues, and validating post-deploy system health. If you build it, you own it. Key Responsibilities Workflow Orchestration: Own the end-to-end migration of media-pipeline workflows onto Temporal designing activity boundaries, retry policies, timeouts, idempotency, and compensation logic. Zero-Downtime Cutovers: Architect cutover strategies including dual-run setups, shadow traffic, automated response diffing, phased traffic shifts, and tested (not assumed) rollback plans . Communication Infrastructure: Own the evolution of our communication platformrouting, multi-channel templating, scheduling, rate limiting, deduplication, delivery tracking, and vendor abstraction layers. Backend Services: Build performant Python microservices ( FastAPI / Django / Flask ) with clear domain boundaries and clean, versioned REST contracts. Data Layer Engineering: Own MySQL schemas end-to-end. Analyze query execution plans (EXPLAIN), optimize indexing, handle partitioning, and execute zero-downtime migrations on large live tables. Event-Driven Architecture: Build and maintain Kafka producers and consumersmanaging custom partitioning, consumer-group scaling, offset management, message replay, Dead-Letter Queues (DLQs), and backpressure strategies. Production Operations & Cost: Instrument, profile, and debug live services on AWS . Understand performance tradeoffs and keep system execution costs optimized. Must-Haves 36 years of backend engineering experience with Python as your primary production language. Hands-on framework experience with FastAPI , Django , or Flask . Deep MySQL fluency (schema design, EXPLAIN analysis, transaction management, indexing, online schema migrations). Production Kafka experience (building, operating, and tuning both producer and consumer sides). Strong AWS hands-on experience, Docker, CI/CD, and modern observability/profiling tools. Sound distributed systems fundamentals (retries, idempotency, partial failure strategies, delivery semantics). Proven experience designing versioned REST APIs, microservices, and caching layers. Good-to-Haves Experience with workflow engines: Temporal , Cadence, Airflow, or AWS Step Functions. Go language experience (opens up cross-project domain extension). Infrastructure & tooling: Kubernetes, Terraform, Redis, PostgreSQL, or Elasticsearch. Protocols: gRPC and Protobuf. Domain knowledge in media/audio processing pipelines, video transcoding, CDNs, or notification engines. Option 2: Executive & Corporate Senior Backend Software Engineer Department: Engineering Reports To: Engineering Lead / Engineering Manager Location: [City / Hybrid / Remote] Position Summary We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to partner directly with our core engineering group to architect, build, and operate mission-critical distributed systems. In this position, you will share equal ownership and accountability with our in-house team. This includes a .