Backend Engineer / SRE Lead

Coverstar; Montreal; Remote; CAD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech company focused on creating safe platforms for Gen Alpha is looking for a Backend Engineer / SRE to maintain and scale backend systems. You'll work with AI and ML pipelines, handle database performance, and ensure high reliability. Ideal candidates have AWS experience and are proactive in optimizing infrastructure. This role offers a chance to build a critical part of a next-gen social platform.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of hands-on backend development experience, preferably on AWS cloud.
• Proficiency with Postgres and DynamoDB, including performance optimization.
• Knowledge of incident response and security best practices.
• Experience building or supporting ML/data pipelines is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Maintain, optimize, and scale backend systems for reliability.
• Partner with AI/ML engineers to build and scale model training pipelines.
• Drive proactive capacity planning and infrastructure improvements.
• Troubleshoot and fix incidents during service disruptions.

Skills

Backend development experience

Postgres

DynamoDB

Incident response

Collaboration with distributed teams

Tools

AWS (Lambda, EC2, ECS, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch)

Python

Node.js

Grafana

Prometheus

Job description

Direct message the job poster from Coverstar

Coverstar is building the first safe, creative, AI-native social platform for Gen Alpha. We’re building a world where the next generation can create, connect, and grow with technology that’s fun, expressive, and safe by design. We’re backed by top investors like a16z, moving fast, and hiring a mission-aligned Backend Engineer / SRE to help us power the next generation of personalized content and community.

What You Will Do

As a Backend Engineer / SRE, you’ll maintain, optimize, and scale Coverstar’s backend systems to ensure they’re secure, reliable, and high-performing. You’ll lead efforts in infrastructure, monitoring, and incident response while partnering with backend, data, and AI teams. Your work keeps every feature, feed, and livestream running smoothly and safely for our community.

Your Responsibilities

• AI/ML Infrastructure Support
• Partner with AI/ML engineers to build and scale model training and inference pipelines.
• Design and maintain data pipelines for preprocessing, labeling automation, and semi-manual labeling workflows.
• Optimize compute and storage architecture for efficient training and deployment.

• Infrastructure Management and Capacity Planning
• Optimize Postgres and DynamoDB performance through query analysis, indexing, and partitioning strategies.
• Ensure database scalability and availability for high-throughput workloads.
• Drive proactive capacity planning and long-term infrastructure improvements.
• Expand centralized monitoring: build on our Grafana/Prometheus setup by unifying logs, metrics, and system health data.
• Integrate advanced alerting: configure automated threshold- and anomaly-based alerts for rapid incident detection.
• Simulate attacks and conduct penetration testing to uncover and fix vulnerabilities.
• Refine and document incident response plans to ensure readiness and cross-team alignment.
• Support moderators with live moderation stream issues (including weekend coverage).
• Troubleshoot and fix incidents: respond to service disruptions during EDT coverage (9AM–9PM), restore services quickly, and drive long-term preventive measures.

You Might be a Fit If

• Have 2+ years of hands on backend development experience, preferably on AWS cloud.
• Proficiency with Postgres and DynamoDB, including performance optimization and scaling strategies.
• Knowledge of incident response, observability practices, and security best practices.
• Experience building or supporting ML/data pipelines is a strong plus, or proven willingness to learn.
• Comfortable collaborating with distributed teams and providing coverage across EDT time zones.
• Proactive, detail-oriented, and excited to build infrastructure that empowers a safe, creative community for Gen Alpha.
• Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, EC2, ECS, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Kinesis)
• Languages & Frameworks: Python, Node.js, FastAPI
• Observability & Ops: Grafana, Prometheus, centralized logging/alerting pipelines
• Security: Automated vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, real-time monitoring
• Clients: Native iOS & Android apps via secure backend APIs

Why Join Us?

• Build and scale the core infrastructure behind the next-gen social platform for Gen Alpha
• Solve high-impact reliability and security challenges at the intersection of scale and safety
• Work with a fast-moving team of backend engineers, AI specialists, and product builders

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