Remote Python Backend Lead

Our client is crafting advanced AI algorithms into exciting consumer experiences for a well-known and beloved global brand, with hundreds of millions of users.

Due to rapid demand they have an opening for a high-impact Python backend lead engineer who is excited to help organize and lead a team to build cloud services, APIs, data pipelines and tools for mass-scale, AI-powered, consumer apps. This could be a great opportunity for an ambitious, hands-on, backend engineer with strong systems architecture skills and interests in mass-scale platforms, backend infrastructure, performance engineering, data analytics and machine learning.

Responsibilities

• Organize and lead a small team of backend platform engineers --- guiding the architecture, planning & tracking the team’s projects and defining roadmaps.

• Design and develop reliable and high-performance backend APIs to power our customer facing services.

• Create internal applications and tools to support the company’s engineering teams

• Benchmark and optimize performance of key APIs, microservices, and databases.

• Build infrastructure to measure, monitor, and enhance our real-time AI and service pipelines and key business analytics.

• Mentor and develop engineers within the Platform Engineering team as well as serving as an engineering bar-raiser across company-wide engineering organizations.

• Interface with other teams in the IKEA family to integrate our capabilities into new IKEA websites and services.

Skills:

• Track record of successful backend systems design & architecture.

• Emotionally-intelligent leadership skills -- able to lead through respect & example.

• Strong expertise in Python in Linux environments (Python super hackers desired).

• Experience with network object storage like Google Cloud Storage or S3.

• Experience with Docker containerized development & deployment.

• Thorough understanding of Git development workflows and branching.

• Proficiency with SQL (especially PostgreSQL).

• Experience planning sprints and coordinating within and between teams.

• Strong English communication skills, both verbal and written.

• Remote work is OK, but must be able to work most of a Pacific Time work day.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes strongly desired.

• Experience with Prometheus and log-based analytics systems desired.

• Experience with Django web development desired.

• Experience with Node.js desired.

• Experience with task/message queues and job scheduling systems (e.g. Celery, RabbitMQ, Airflow, Dagster, etc.) desired.

Benefits

• Excellent health & retirement benefits. Full medical, dental, and vision coverage.

• Strong people-first culture with generous PTO, a focus on improving each other, and an actively shaped team culture to ensure a happy and healthy working environment for all.