Staff Python Engineer (Contract)

Job description

Staff Python Engineer Independent Contractor Engagement | Remote — Eastern Europe | Data Engineering This is an independent contractor engagement. This is not an offer of employment. CONTRACTOR ENGAGEMENT NOTICE: This opportunity is structured as an independent contractor (B2B) engagement. The selected contractor will be responsible for all applicable taxes, social contributions, and statutory obligations in their country of residence. No employment relationship, employee benefits, equity awards, paid leave, or statutory employment protections are created by this engagement. Contractors must hold or obtain the legal right to provide services as an independent contractor in their jurisdiction. About the Role Arch Systems is building the future of manufacturing intelligence. Our ArchFX Cloud platform processes millions of IoT data points daily from advanced factory machines worldwide, helping leading manufacturers optimize efficiency, sustainability, and growth. We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our data engineering pod as an independent contractor. You'll work with data collected from factory machines and devices — processing, transforming, and preparing it for analytics and visualization. You'll manage and optimize the data pipelines that feed our analytics platform, collaborating closely with our cloud and data science teams to deliver robust, scalable data solutions. Scope of Engagement As an independent contractor, you will provide the following services: Design and deliver backend features in Python for large-scale enterprise SaaS. Contribute to technical excellence through testing, CI/CD, and secure design. Provide technical guidance and architectural input across backend initiatives. Design data models and pipelines that turn high-volume sensor data streams into clean, structured time-series events, handling late-arriving data, retention windows, and reclassification when downstream rules change. Own a sync and reconciliation engine that keeps thousands of distributed edge clients consistent with the cloud, incremental updates on demand, retroactive resync to correct historical state, and atomic merging of concurrent edits without data loss. Build integrations between our platform and customer enterprise systems; keep two systems of record consistent under partial failures, late data, and ambiguous record matching. Design for correctness under concurrency, interval-based data, transactional guarantees across long-running workflows, and consistency between async workers, polling clients, and human edits. Build a configuration system that lets large enterprise customers tailor behaviour without forking the codebase, formula-driven configuration evaluated against a runtime context, with safe extension points for customer-specific logic. Build APIs reliable and fast enough to power latency-sensitive operational UIs, endpoints hit every few seconds, where a slow or wrong response is immediately visible to a paying customer. What You Bring 10+ years of professional software development (Python and Django required). Experience with large, complex backend SaaS applications. Strong skills in modelling complex data systems and delivering scalable solutions. Hands-on experience supporting production code and iterating with customer feedback. Celery, RabbitMQ, TimescaleDB/Athena, manufacturing/industrial tech background is a plus. About the Stack ArchFX Cloud is primarily a Django API server deployed on AWS using Kubernetes, with a PostgreSQL database for all metadata and Athena over S3 for machine data. High-volume machine data is served via a dedicated TimescaleDB time series database and merged with low-volume metadata inside the Django APIs. Customer-facing UIs are implemented as a single-page web app in TypeScript/ Angular. All backend code is written in Python. Background workers run via Celery on RabbitMQ. The product is delivered as SaaS, primarily in single-tenant deployments for large enterprise customers, with infrastructure managed via Terraform and a continuous delivery mindset. Engagement Terms Contract Rate The annualised contract rate for this engagement is USD $120,000 – $140,000 , based on qualifications, experience, skills, and scope of services. Final rate is determined by relevant technical expertise, experience, and expected contribution. Rates may be paid in equivalent local currency or USD as agreed in the services agreement. Contractor Status This is an independent contractor (B2B) engagement and is not an offer of employment. The following apply: No employment relationship is created between the contractor and Arch Systems. The contractor is solely responsible for all taxes, VAT/GST, social security contributions, pension contributions, and any other statutory obligations in their country of residence. The contractor is not eligible for employee benefits, equity awards, paid time off, sick leave, health insurance, or participation in any Arch Systems employee benefit programmes. The contractor must maintain any registrations, licences, or business entities required by applicable law in their jurisdiction to legally provide services on a self-employed or B2B basis. The contractor is responsible for their own professional indemnity, public liability, or other applicable insurance as required in their jurisdiction. The engagement does not guarantee a minimum number of hours or a fixed term of work. Governing Law & Jurisdiction Specific contractual terms, governing law, and jurisdiction will be set out in a written services agreement prior to commencement of work. Contractors are encouraged to seek independent legal advice before signing. Working With Arch Work on high-scale industrial data systems used by leading global manufacturers. Collaborate with experienced backend, infrastructure, and data engineers solving complex distributed systems problems. Operate in a remote-first, highly asynchronous engineering culture with significant ownership and autonomy. Contribute to systems that process real-world manufacturing telemetry at scale and directly impact customer operations. Location & Eligibility This engagement is open to contractors based in Eastern Europe. Arch champions a remote-first work environment and welcomes talent across the region. Contractors must be legally eligible to provide independent contractor services from their country of residence. Arch Systems does not provide visa sponsorship, work authorization, or employment sponsorship of any kind in connection with this contractor engagement. Sanctions & Regulatory Compliance Arch Systems is committed to full compliance with regulations from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and all applicable international sanctions programmes. We do not enter into contractor engagements, or any transactions, that conflict with OFAC regulations or applicable sanctions. Applicants located in, or nationals of, countries or regions subject to comprehensive US or applicable international sanctions are not eligible for this engagement. By applying, candidates confirm they are not subject to any applicable sanctions restrictions. Application Process Please submit resumes in English. We encourage candidates with deep backend and distributed systems experience to apply, even if they do not meet every listed qualification. This posting is for an independent contractor engagement only. Nothing in this posting constitutes an offer of employment, a guarantee of engagement, or a representation of the terms of any specific contract. Final terms are subject to a written services agreement. About Arch Systems At Arch Systems, we empower discrete manufacturing facilities with deep data insights that enable optimal efficiency, precise KPIs, and proactive decision-making. We work with leading manufacturers to integrate and optimise their data for actionable intelligence, fuelling productivity and operational excellence. Arch Systems | Independent Contractor Engagement | Remote — Eastern Europe