Senior Backend Engineer - APIs, Data, and Scale

Job description

Jellyfish's engineering team is solving one of the hardest problems in engineering operations: understanding how teams actually organize themselves and deliver work. To help us get there, we're looking for a senior backend engineer who loves untangling complexity and building systems that scale. You'll join a tight-knit team of senior engineers working to map the real structure of our customers' engineering organizations. Teams don't organize the way org charts suggest. Projects span multiple teams. Dependencies create hidden bottlenecks. Your job is to build the capabilities that let our product represent team configurations as they actually exist. This means finding pragmatic solutions—the right abstractions that capture 80% of the problem. Aspire to handle the complexity, but don't fall into the completionism trap. The goal is customers seeing their organization clearly and understanding how teams are performing and projects are progressing. This role demands someone who can navigate complicated data models, trace dependencies across systems, and design solutions that are both powerful and maintainable. You'll work with data from project management tools, version control systems, and collaboration platforms to build a complete picture of how engineering work flows through an organization. The best candidates are senior engineers who get energized by complex technical challenges, care deeply about data modeling and system design, and want to build products that help engineering leaders make better decisions. Let's talk about what you'll do: - Design, plan and implement key features as part of a highly effective development team - Rapidly deliver value for our customers by pushing features to our AWS-hosted SaaS environment daily, with automated CI/CD pipelines - Provide technical and product expertise within your team and across the organization - Communicate effectively about project status and technical issues - Participate in your team’s agile process and work to continually improve your team’s capabilities - Provide support for production operations of the Jellyfish product - Actively participate in a culture supportive of growth and inclusion on your team Let's talk about what you need to excel: - 10+ years of experience building SaaS products with a focus on Back End development - Strong skills in Python, and passion for building production software systems using Django - Expert-level abilities in data modeling in relational database systems and experience with and interest in other database technologies such as columnar systems. - Experience with scaling, performance, and benchmarking of APIs and data processing systems. - Fluency with tools such as Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro and a track record of using them to build and ship fast. - Have worked in or interested in a growth-stage startup - Curiosity - great at asking questions, figuring out what needs to be done, building consensus, and executing - Love learning new things and teaching others what you know - Strong communication skills - Enjoyment of collaborative work A list of job experiences and qualification requirements is great, but humility, a performance-driven attitude, and a team-player approach are most important to us. We love to have fun and win in the process. We only hire people who have a passion for building great companies in an environment where a sense of humor is a must. Occasional travel may be required. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the US. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time. Let’s talk about us! This is all about you, but you want to know a little about us. Jellyfish https://jellyfish.co/ enables leaders to effectively build AI-integrated engineering teams, align engineering decisions with business initiatives and deliver the right software efficiently and on time. AI tools alone won’t transform your org—Jellyfish shows you what’s working, what’s not, and how to build high-performing teams that know how to use AI the right way.