Senior Backend Python Engineer

Shelf is a company with over 100 employees across multiple U.S. states and European countries, experiencing high velocity growth powered by an innovative product in their category, with 3X growth for 3 years in a row. They have raised over $60 million in funding from investors including Tiger Global, Insight Partners, and Connecticut Innovations. The leadership team has deep knowledge in knowledge management, AI domain expertise, and enterprise SaaS background.

• Strong senior-level backend engineering experience in production systems.
• Strong Python skills and ability to design clean, maintainable backend code.
• Good distributed systems judgment including concurrency, failure handling, data consistency, async work, and service boundaries.
• Hands-on cloud experience in AWS, Azure, or similar environment.
• Comfort with SQL and NoSQL systems, schema design, and performance tuning.
• Ability to take ownership from problem statement to design to production rollout.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills.
• AI-native working style, using AI tools in daily engineering workflow.

Strong Plus:

• Experience with LLM-backed systems, search, retrieval, AI infrastructure, or data-heavy pipelines.
• Working knowledge of TypeScript or ability to contribute across the stack.
• Experience shaping technical direction for other engineers without formal management responsibility.

• Design and ship backend services, APIs, data flows, and background processing for production systems.
• Turn vague requirements into concrete technical plans, trade-offs, and execution.
• Own services after launch: reliability, observability, performance, and incident follow-through.
• Make sound decisions around system boundaries, data models, interfaces, and scaling paths.
• Write clear technical specs, architecture notes, and diagrams to help the team move faster.
• Work closely with product, frontend, and platform engineers to deliver end-to-end outcomes.
• Improve engineering leverage with AI tooling, automation, and internal workflows.
• Raise the quality bar through code review, design review, and pragmatic technical leadership.