Senior Backend Engineer

• Senior Backend Engineer / Architect
• ImagineArt · Remote · Full-Time

About the role

We're a bootstrapped GenAI platform serving image and video generation at real scale — Fortune 500 clients, $35M+ ARR, and traffic that doesn't wait for you to catch up. We need a backend engineer who thinks in systems, not just services. You'll own the architecture behind our generation pipelines, inference orchestration, and the infrastructure that keeps latency low while volume climbs.

This is a hands-on architect role. You will design and write code, not just draw diagrams.

What you'll do

Design and own backend systems that handle high-throughput, asynchronous workloads (generation queues, worker orchestration, media processing)

Architect for scale and reliability — you'll make the calls on data flow, service boundaries, and failure handling

Build and optimize async pipelines: job queuing, retries, backpressure, dead-letter handling, and everything that keeps millions of requests moving

Improve performance and cost at the infrastructure level — inference is expensive, and efficiency is a product feature here

Set technical direction and raise the engineering bar for the team through review and mentorship

What we're looking for

Strong backend experience (5+ years) with real ownership of production systems at scale

Proven system design skills — you can defend your architecture decisions with tradeoffs, not buzzwords

Hands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar), and distributed workers

Comfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environments

Ability to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environment

Nice to have

Experience with Go (or willingness to work in it — we lean on Go for backend)

Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelines

Track record contributing to open source (we look at GitHub signal)

Why ImagineArt

Real revenue, real users, no VC treadmill — decisions are made by engineers and founders, fast

Genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of AI and scale

Fully remote, full-time