Lead Backend Engineer for ML Ops Platform

Avala; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Avala is seeking a Lead Backend Software Engineer to design and build the backend API stack for the Digital Assembly Line, handling petabytes of sensor data and enterprise integrations. You will set the technical direction for the Python/Django backend and lead architecture decisions.

You will design RESTful APIs, build large-scale data processing pipelines with Celery, and mentor junior engineers while focusing on performance, observability, and robust PostgreSQL schemas in a SF-based team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production backend systems in Python (Django strongly preferred).
• Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration experience.
• Strong SQL and database design knowledge.
• CI/CD pipeline experience (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar).
• Experience with distributed task queues (Celery) at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and build RESTful APIs using Django REST Framework for dataset management, annotation workflows, and export pipelines
• Architect large-scale data processing pipelines with Celery for LiDAR, camera, and radar data
• Implement monitoring, deployment, and observability systems
• Lead architecture decisions that power the Digital Assembly Line product
• Optimize PostgreSQL queries and schema design for datasets with millions of items
• Mentor junior engineers and establish backend engineering best practices

Skills

Python / Django

REST APIs

Celery

SQL / PostgreSQL

CI/CD

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Buildkite / GitHub Actions

AWS

Job description

Avala is seeking a Lead Backend Software Engineer to design and build the backend API stack for the Digital Assembly Line, handling petabytes of sensor data and enterprise integrations. You will set the technical direction for the Python/Django backend and lead architecture decisions.

You will design RESTful APIs, build large-scale data processing pipelines with Celery, and mentor junior engineers while focusing on performance, observability, and robust PostgreSQL schemas in a SF-based team.