Product Engineer, Platform

Callimacus; Milano; In loco; EUR 45.000 - 65.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

Callimacus in Milan is seeking a senior backend engineer to shape the platform as production scales. You will own the architecture, design core backend services, and guide API design for multi-modal AI workflows.

You will optimize performance, lead reliability improvements across AWS infrastructure (ECS, RDS, S3, ALB), and shape data models across Aurora/ClickHouse for scalable analytics. Join a small, founder-led team with high ownership and growth opportunities.

Competenze

• Strong TypeScript and Node.js — async, concurrency, API design.
• Experience with AWS architecture and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with relational and analytical stores (Aurora, ClickHouse).
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and streaming systems.
• Observability, incident practice, and post-mortems.
• Focus on performance and cost optimization; security and reliability engineering.

Mansioni

• Set the architectural direction for core backend services and APIs powering multimodal AI workflows.
• Own performance end-to-end across services, databases, and infrastructure.
• Architect the cloud footprint on AWS with security and cost efficiency in mind.
• Design the data layer across Aurora/ClickHouse and data pipelines.
• Raise the reliability bar with monitoring, alerting, and incident response.

Conoscenze

TypeScript

Node.js

AWS architecture

Observability

Performance optimization

Reliability engineering

Security engineering

Strumenti

Docker

AWS

CI/CD

Descrizione del lavoro

At Callimacus, we're working to change how people interact on the web. For the past 30 years, the user experience as we know it has been anchored to a typographic paradigm — predefined navigation trees of pages, sections, and menus — established in the Nineties when the web was born.

As the way people get informed, entertained, and shop evolves, traditional websites and interfaces are losing relevance, and the tools available limit the creative evolution of digital experiences. Callimacus was born from the conviction that the whole web experience can and should be reinvented.

So we built the engine for a different kind of digital experience. Callimacus is a multi-agentic platform that plugs into a company's existing stack and reads multi-dimensional signals to understand what a visitor wants in the moment. Then, in milliseconds, our proprietary technology composes the entire interface around that intent, selecting the most relevant content and components as the person interacts.

Callimacus was founded in 2024 with the early backing of Brunello Cucinelli — one of our first investors, and now one of our customers. We launched in January 2026 to strong organic interest from enterprise customers, and recently raised from Salesforce Ventures the largest AI investment they have made in Italy, and one of their most significant in Europe.

We are a small, product-focused, founder-led team. We work on hard problems that haven't been solved before — by us or anyone else — and the people who join now get to solve them. We move fast, with high agency and strong ownership.

About Callimacus

At Callimacus, we're working to change how people interact on the web. For the past 30 years, the user experience as we know it has been anchored to a typographic paradigm — predefined navigation trees of pages, sections, and menus — established in the Nineties when the web was born.

As the way people get informed, entertained, and shop evolves, traditional websites and interfaces are losing relevance, and the tools available limit the creative evolution of digital experiences. Callimacus was born from the conviction that the whole web experience can and should be reinvented.

So we built the engine for a different kind of digital experience. Callimacus is a multi-agentic platform that plugs into a company's existing stack and reads multi-dimensional signals to understand what a visitor wants in the moment. Then, in milliseconds, our proprietary technology composes the entire interface around that intent, selecting the most relevant content and components as the person interacts.

Callimacus was founded in 2024 with the early backing of Brunello Cucinelli — one of our first investors, and now one of our customers. We launched in January 2026 to strong organic interest from enterprise customers, and recently raised from Salesforce Ventures the largest AI investment they have made in Italy, and one of their most significant in Europe.

We are a small, product-focused, founder-led team. We work on hard problems that haven't been solved before — by us or anyone else — and the people who join now get to solve them. We move fast, with high agency and strong ownership.

What you\'ll build

You'll join a small senior team at the point where the platform's foundations are still being set. Callimacus is in production with demanding customers, and the architecture, the performance envelope, and the shape of the developer experience are all still yours to influence. Decisions you make in your first months will still be load-bearing in three years.

• Set the architectural direction. Lead the design and implementation of the core backend services and APIs that power complex, multimodal AI workflows — making deliberate trade-offs between flexibility, performance, and what will still be maintainable two years from now.
• Own performance end to end. Across services, databases, and infrastructure. Design systems that scale gracefully under growing load, and find the bottlenecks, failure modes, and technical risks before production does.
• Architect the cloud footprint. Design and evolve our AWS infrastructure — ECS, RDS, S3, ALB — with reliability, security, and cost efficiency treated as one problem rather than three. Docker-based deployments, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
• Design the data layer. Data models and access patterns across relational and analytical stores (Aurora, ClickHouse), ingestion pipelines, and long-running analytical workloads — with informed calls on consistency, throughput, and cost at scale.
• Raise the reliability bar. Monitoring, alerting, and logging standards on Datadog and CloudWatch. Lead incident analysis and post-mortems, and turn production issues into permanent improvements rather than patches.

What matters to us

These are the same for every role at Callimacus. We hire people who get the job done and care about the end result — the product, the experience, the people using it.

• Ownership. You feel deeply responsible for your work and behave accordingly — from design through production and after. You don\'t wait to be told what to do; you see problems and act. “It\'s not my job” is not part of your mindset.
• Invention. You light up at hard problems and are creative at finding solutions. You experiment, get your hands dirty, and land things. You hold very high standards and always look for ways to improve.
• Team-oriented. You're someone others can count on. You support the best idea even when it's not yours, disagree productively, give and take feedback, share credit, and take on unglamorous work when that's what the team needs.

The craft bar for this role: Strong TypeScript and Node.js — async, concurrency, API design — with a track record of building and scaling production systems where performance, reliability, and data volume were daily constraints.

Where you might be strong

We're early, and nobody is strong in all of these — we don't expect you to be. Depth in two or three, plus curiosity about the rest, is what wins. If that's you, apply even if you don't tick every box.

• AWS architecture and infrastructure as code
• Relational and analytical stores at scale (Aurora, ClickHouse, or similar)
• Event-driven architectures and streaming systems
• Observability and incident practice
• Performance and cost optimization
• Security and reliability engineering

Bonus points

• Experience as an early engineer or technical lead at a startup or fast-growing company
• Microservices architectures, or hosting and deploying distributed frontends
• Hands-on work with AI/ML systems, especially inference-heavy or data-intensive platforms

What we offer

We\'ll ask a lot of you, and we give a lot in return. We want Callimacus to be a place where talented, driven people flourish, and we take that commitment seriously. A few things you\'ll find (and there\'s more):

• A product that will light you up. You\'ll work at the frontier of what AI can do today, on problems nobody has solved before — which means most weeks you\'ll be reasoning from first principles rather than looking up how it's done. What you land becomes the way it works.
• An exceptional opportunity for growth. You\'ll work directly with the founders in a small, senior, talent-dense team, with high agency from day one, and play an essential role in the growth of the company.
• Top-of-the-Italian-market salary and equity. You'll own a real piece of what you're building, aligning your growth with the company's long-term success.
• Amazing offices in the centre of Milan. In the Moscova neighbourhood, one of the liveliest areas in the city and twenty minutes from anywhere.
• Top-of-the-market health insurance. Comprehensive cover, for you and the people who depend on you.
• A welfare budget you decide how to spend. Gym, mental health, museums, courses, travel — whatever actually makes your life better.
• Genuinely good food all day. High-quality, restaurant-level meals, including breakfast, lunch, and all-day snacks.

One note before applying

We believe working side by side leads to faster progress, stronger ramp-up, and a culture built around community. For the next year we have decided to be in-person first. We've invested in making our workplace worth coming to, and we're happy to support your commuting. And we don't work by tickets: priorities get redefined often, sometimes mid-week, and you'll need to be comfortable with that. If you're set on remote or on a settled roadmap, this isn't your role. If you want to be in the room while the platform takes shape, we'd like to meet you.

Location: On-site, central Milan (Moscova area)

Stack: TypeScript (Node.js), AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, ALB), Aurora, ClickHouse

Experience: 4–6 years (Mid) or 6+ years (Senior)

Gross annual salary: €45–55k (Mid) / €55–65k (Senior), plus equity