Senior Backend Engineer

Sr. SWE (Distributed Systems)

HumanSignal builds software that helps people give meaning to data. We believe that data labeling is fundamentally a human effort in guidance, orchestration and targeted feedback with AI knowledge sources to produce deeply meaningful actionable data context in real-world production applications. We believe such ability should be open, accessible and practical for everyone in society. We believe in humans.

We’re growing engineering to support delivering novel product work in a data labeling automation platform powered by GenAI and agents. We’re looking for the next group of passionate and talented engineers who desire to join and grow alongside us in our mission to build and deliver software that democratizes everyone's ability to harness these technologies.

About the Opportunity:

Label studio Label Studio Enterprise is being used by some of the world's most innovative companies.

With the growth of our user base it is critically important that we continue to lead the way by quickly providing new business value. Additionally, we must ensure that our platform is scalable and reliable. To do this, HumanSignal is looking for a Senior Back End Engineer. We are looking for someone to leverage their real-world experience building out a scalable platform, APIs, and data systems services

• Collaborate with other backend engineers on new and existing features.
• Participate in all aspects of the development process.
• Establish standards for style, maintainability, and best practices.
• Identify areas of improvement in the code base.
• Drive change by being an advocate for improvements.
• Provide leadership and mentorship to teammates.

If this opportunity sounds intriguing and you're drawn to engineering challenges, have a strong desire to make a big impact as part of a small, agile team, in an exciting space, we'd love to talk to you.

What You'll Bring:

• Extensive experience designing and building high-performance and high-scale distributed backend systems, generally supporting cloud SaaS applications.
• Experience building applications and services on public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP). Bonus points for data or MLOps systems.
• 5+ years of professional experience building application support by REST APIs and web endpoint frameworks (FastAPI, Django)
• Production experience with Python, Java, Go, Kotlin, Scala or Rust languages
• Expert knowledge of database and data warehouse (Postgres, BigQuery)
• Expert knowledge of streaming event and messaging architectures (Spark, Beam, Kafka)
• High user empathy, product-value centric, and a desire to understand and impact product metrics
• A passion and aptitude for impactful communication at a Sr+ SWE IC level, using TDDs, code reviews, presentation, and thoughtful feedback.
• BSCS, related degree or equivalent practical experience

Languages, Frameworks, and Technologies We Use:

Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, JS, Typescript, React, OpenAI API, Spark, BigQuery, Kafka, Jest, Cypress, AWS, kubernetes, Postgres & Redis

Within 1 week, you'll:

• Setup your development environment, and enhance the self-serve documentation and workflows to ensure it’s pristine and effective.
• Meet your buddy, team, key stakeholders and the founders
• Participate in team meetings and get close to the sprint in progress

Within 1 month, you'll:

• Make multiple production contributions, across small features, enhancements and bug fixes as you ramp up on codebase, systems, workflows, and product.
• Give feedback in retrospectives, bringing in your experiences and a desire to build a world class engineering team.
• Review multiple pull requests, and leverage your convictions as a software engineer to see design patterns, code style and syntax upheld.
• Resolve multiple engineering dependent customer support requests—quickly get to the root cause and resolve complex technical issues.

Within 3 months, you'll:

• Independently drive and fully own development and delivery of complex features, and present on them in company meetings.
• Review PRDs and lead creation or review of TDDs,
• Experience and give feedback across a quarterly OKRs cycle, and help the team understand and plan its next quarter commitments.
• Continue to engineering team to improve our velocity and predictability
• Contribute to our industry leading Open Source products and community (with over 20K+ users)
• Mentor and guide junior engineers

Within 6 months, you'll:

• Take the lead and own major features collaborating with other engineers for successful delivery
• Leverage your experience to work closely with Product Management, Engineering and Customer Support staff to identify, document and help resole technical issues and product feature/functionality gaps
• Support and help grow the open source community through your participation in meet-ups, design/code camps and technical speaking engagements
• You will play a key role in shipping highly scalable products and the next evolution in labeling software.

In 1 year, you'll:

• Continue delivering increasingly complex projects
• Play an active role in advancing your career to the next level

At HumanSignal we pay based on regional compensation market rate ranges across the globe. We are hiring for this role across North and South America as well as Europe. The base cash compensation range is $140,000 to $200,000 USD. These ranges are provided by market data and are in good faith. The final offer details are determined by several factors including candidate experience, expertise, as well as applicable industry knowledge and may vary from the pay ranges listed above.

It is an exciting time at HumanSignal, we are a growing startup and at this stage we are constantly evolving. While we have put a lot of thought into your first and most important initiatives, it’s only an example and something we will work on together. We're always learning and growing, so like us this role will evolve and expand. We hope that this opportunity sounds exciting to you and that you consider joining us on our journey!