Senior Backend Engineer

Botdot Oy; Helsinki; On-site; EUR 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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Remote work flexibility

Innovative startup environment

Job summary

Botdot Oy in Helsinki is looking for a backend engineer to build infrastructure for AI search and commerce systems. You will maintain backend services and design data ingestion flows while ensuring data integrity and system reliability.

The ideal candidate has strong experience in backend engineering, especially with Python and PostgreSQL, and is comfortable handling operational challenges. This position allows for remote work initially with plans to move closer to the office.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering experience building production APIs and services.
• Strong Python experience with flexibility to work in other stacks.
• Strong PostgreSQL understanding including schema design and operational debugging.
• Hands-on experience with third-party APIs, OAuth, and error handling.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend services connecting to external platforms.
• Design data ingestion flows for various business assets.
• Normalize data for AI systems used in workflows.
• Improve webhook handling and database performance.

Skills

Strong backend engineering experience

Strong Python backend experience

PostgreSQL understanding

Experience with third-party APIs

Understanding of data sync problems

Infrastructure-as-code experience

Cloud deployment experience

Ability to work independently

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Job description

About the Job

We're building infrastructure for the next generation of AI search, AI assistants, and agent-driven commerce. Our platform helps businesses connect their websites, catalogs, content, and commerce systems so they can be understood, discovered, and acted on by AI systems. That means ingesting data from external platforms, keeping it fresh, transforming it into reliable internal models, and exposing it through products used for AI visibility, assistant experiences, and commerce workflows.

What You Will Work On

• Build and maintain backend services that connect to external platforms through APIs, OAuth, webhooks, and scheduled sync.
• Design ingestion flows for website pages, product catalogs, documents, policies, and other business assets.
• Normalize external platform data into internal models used by AI search, assistant experiences, analytics, and commerce workflows.
• Improve webhook handling, retries, idempotency, failure recovery, rate‑limit behavior, and sync observability.
• Own database design for integration and ingestion systems, including schema design, migrations, indexing, and query performance.
• Maintain infrastructure-as-code, cloud environments, deployment workflows, secrets, and operational tooling.
• Build internal tools to diagnose failed syncs, stale data, provider API errors, customer configuration issues, and production incidents.
• Work closely with product and engineering to turn ambiguous integration problems into reliable platform capabilities.
• Stay current with evolving platform APIs, AI agent protocols, ecommerce standards, and integration patterns.

Must-Have Skills

• Strong backend engineering experience building production APIs, services, and integration systems.
• Strong Python backend experience, with flexibility to work across TypeScript, PHP, or other production web stacks when needed.
• Strong PostgreSQL/database understanding, including schema design, indexing, migrations, query performance, data integrity, and operational debugging.
• Hands‑on experience with third‑party APIs, OAuth, API keys, webhooks, HMAC signatures, pagination, rate limits, retries, and error handling.
• Strong understanding of data sync problems: freshness, deletes, partial failures, idempotency, deduplication, and schema drift.
• Hands‑on experience with infrastructure‑as‑code such as Terraform, Pulumi, or similar.
• Experience with cloud deployment, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, secrets management, and production operations.
• Ability to work independently, make technical decisions, investigate unfamiliar systems, and keep moving in a fast‑changing startup environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Drupal, HubSpot, Google APIs, ecommerce APIs, CMS APIs, or integration platforms.
• Experience with async backend systems, queues, workflow engines, scheduled jobs, Dagster, or Temporal.
• Experience with AI/search infrastructure, retrieval systems, structured content, or data enrichment pipelines.
• Experience with Docker, containerized deployments, cloud observability, and operational tooling.
• Experience with PHP, WordPress plugins, Drupal modules, CMS extensions, or customer‑site integration work.
• Experience building internal tools for engineering, support, debugging, or customer operations.

How We Work

This is not a narrow ticket‑taking role. You’ll be expected to understand the problem, read provider documentation, test assumptions, make tradeoffs, and ship maintainable solutions. We care about practical engineering: secure APIs, reliable sync, clear data models, good observability, strong database fundamentals, and infrastructure that can be operated confidently.

You should be comfortable with ambiguity, willing to learn quickly, and interested in staying on top of changes in AI, commerce, search, and platform ecosystems.

This Role Is A Good Fit If

• You enjoy turning messy external systems into clean internal capabilities.
• You like owning production systems, not just building features.
• You are comfortable debugging across API, database, infrastructure, and customer configuration layers.
• You can work independently while communicating clearly with a small team.
• You want to help shape a fast‑moving product category rather than maintain a static system.

This Role Is Probably Not A Fit If

• You only want to work on clean internal APIs with predictable inputs.
• You dislike operational ownership or production debugging.
• You need fully specified tickets before starting.
• You are not interested in learning new APIs, protocols, and platform behavior as the market evolves.

Logistics

Role is remote in the beginning, but we will be moving to an office in Helsinki - you can affect the location. We aim to be present at the office at least 50‑50. In the beginning closer to 100. We also have staff near Turku.

Remuneration

We're a VC funded startup with a product that is just launching with significant traction. We are aiming to pay well, relative to your skill level. A part of the remuneration will be in the form of share options.

Send your application. We'll make you an offer.