Senior Back End Developer

Role overview

Join CoLab as a Senior Back End Developer to build the backend systems powering Operator, an AI-driven intelligence layer. You’ll design and deliver scalable retrieval pipelines, AI search infrastructure, and APIs that transform data into reliable customer-facing experiences.

Key missions

• Design and build backend services for Operator, with a focus on scalable retrieval systems and APIs.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with AI, Product, Design, and Engineering to ship customer-facing features and improve search quality.
• Mentor and lead technically through architecture discussions and code reviews, while improving reliability and performance of backend infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Think deeply about data architecture and how information is organized, retrieved, and transformed.
• Make architectural decisions in evolving product environments.
• Build and improve infrastructure for AI search relevance and retrieval workflows.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering background with 7+ years building production backend software.
• Strong experience with Python and modern backend development.
• Experience building APIs, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications.
• Strong understanding of databases, system architecture, and scalable backend design.
• Experience working with structured and unstructured data.
• Excellent communication skills with technical and non-technical teammates.
• Comfortable designing backend systems from first principles.

Nice to have

• Experience with vector databases and/or search infrastructure (TurboPuffer experience is a plus).
• Experience with retrieval systems, semantic search, or RAG architectures.
• Experience with AI-powered applications or LLM workflows.
• Experience with embeddings, ranking, or information retrieval.
• Experience with event-driven architectures.
• Experience building enterprise SaaS platforms.