About the role

Role Overview

Senior Backend Engineer at Teak, designing and building cloud-native backend systems and microservices for a platform that powers embedded refund protection at massive scale. You will own your work end-to-end while contributing to architecture, performance, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

System Architecture: Help design scalable, resilient backend systems and define service boundaries; evaluate architectural trade-offs and strengthen team code reviews.
Cloud Infrastructure & Operations: Build and operate backend systems on AWS, working with services such as ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, Lambda, and CloudWatch.
Performance Engineering: Improve performance across the stack (DB query plans, indexing, caching layers, async pipelines) and proactively address bottlenecks.
API & Backend Development: Design and develop APIs and backend microservices handling extremely high event throughput.
Platform Improvement: Refactor, optimize, and introduce new approaches to continuously improve services.
Code Quality & Standards: Participate in code reviews and write comprehensive automated tests.
Technical Documentation: Document architecture decisions, system designs, and performance findings.
Agile Participation: Participate in sprint planning, estimation, retrospectives, and daily standups.
Production Support: Join an on-call rotation and troubleshoot production issues using root-cause analysis.
AI-Augmented Development: Use AI coding tools/agentic workflows and MCP-based tooling; help evaluate and integrate LLM APIs and MCP tooling into backend services.

Requirements

5+ years of professional Python development.
3+ years building production applications with Django or similar CMS frameworks.
Experience contributing to the architecture of high-volume, distributed backend systems.
Hands-on experience operating production systems on AWS (ECS, RDS, SQS, CloudWatch or similar).
Strong PostgreSQL knowledge: query optimization and indexing/performance tuning at scale.
Hands-on experience with caching strategies such as Redis or Memcached.

Nice to Have

Experience with AI coding tools/agentic workflows and MCP tooling for backend development.
Strong asynchronous processing pipeline experience.

About Teak

Teak is a technology company focused on reinventing refunds by providing an embedded refund protection platform. Its SaaS platform enables insurance carriers, event organizers, and booking/ticketing platforms to offer a high-quality digital purchasing experience at large scale. Teak’s e-commerce solution is integrated into millions of carts each month.