Senior Backend Engineer

Recruiting from Scratch LLC; New York (NY); Remote; USD 213,000 - 246,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

20 days PTO yearly

Global offsites

Gym stipend

Phone bill stipend

Continuing education credits

US medical/vision/dental

Job summary

Recruiting from Scratch LLC is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own key backend services and data pipelines. You’ll design, build, and scale Python-based systems on AWS, exposing robust APIs and handling vast unstructured data for insurers and other clients.

You will join a high‑ownership team, mentor peers, and contribute to architecture decisions while delivering reliable, scalable infrastructure with a focus on correctness and explainability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems.
• Proficiency in Python and AWS stack.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases and performance tuning.
• Experience designing external-facing APIs and third-party integrations.

Responsibilities

• Lead the scoping, design, and delivery of complex backend systems in Python on AWS.
• Build and scale LLM-based systems processing large volumes of unstructured data.
• Design external-facing APIs and integrations with third-party systems.
• Own database and query performance as data volume grows and manage technical debt.
• Mentor other engineers through code review and design feedback.

Skills

Python

AWS

Relational Databases

System Design

Communication

Tools

PostgreSQL

AWS Lambda

AWS Step Functions

APIs

Job description

Who is Recruiting from Scratch

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/

About Us

Insurance is a $7T global industry built on professional labor: underwriting, claims, pricing, operations, and distribution. We are building AI that can perform that work. We create professional-grade AI systems for insurers: software that can read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows and operate over long-time horizons. It begins by augmenting professionals with the tools to succeed at their jobs. That earns us the right to learn from real decisions, capture decision traces, and automate what can be automated successfully over time. Our products are already in production with leading insurers, driving measurable outcomes and expanding across functions. The opportunity is far broader than any single workflow: to build the AI operating system for decision-making across insurance. For people who want to work on AI that matters, in a sector where correctness, trust, and real-world impact count, we are just getting started. We’re backed by leading investors such as IA Ventures and Inspired Capital, and our team brings experience from Facebook, Palantir, Google, Amazon, McKinsey, Mastercard, and Uber.

Our Values (This is important): Many organizations have a dusty list of corporate values that no one ever follows. We are not one of those companies. Our values are designed to unlock the potential of our employees.

• Hustle and Determination - We hire people who take full ownership of their craft and relentlessly pursue excellence with speed and determination. We choose the hard problems and do not give up. This is the foundation of how we work and how we win.
• Deliver Customer Impact - We're obsessed with customer impact. Every feature, every line of code, every decision is measured against one question: does this help insurers make better decisions? If it doesn't drive speed, accuracy, or profitability for our customers, we don't build it.
• Meritocracy - We're building something exceptional, and that requires exceptional people and ideas. We have a high bar but we reward excellence with rapid growth. If you're the best at what you do, you'll thrive here.
• Transparency - We value honest, transparent communication over politics. We challenge ideas, not people. We say what needs to be said, even when it's hard. This is how we solve problems fast and find the truth.
• Experiment Relentlessly - Many of the problems we face have never been solved before. We tackle them by testing quickly, measuring rigorously, and iterating until we find the path forward. Speed of learning is our advantage.

In addition to our NY office, we have remote employees speaking 10+ languages across the globe. But we invest in bringing our people together both for regional meetups and global offsites (2021 - Playa Del Carmen | 2022 - Rome | 2023 - Buenos Aires | 2024 - Lisbon | 2025 - Cartagena).

Our culture isn't for everyone, and that's ok. But for the people who are a fit, they can't imagine working elsewhere.

About The Role

We're looking for strong backend engineers who love building reliable systems around fragmented, high-value data. Our platform ingests billions of highly unstructured data points every day, extracts precise information from them, and surfaces the insights insurers rely on for high‑stakes decisions. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll own strategically important, complex pieces of that system with minimal oversight: the services, data models, pipelines, and evals at its center, and the external‑facing APIs that power our customers' core workflows. You'll work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering, on a problem the industry hasn't solved effectively yet. You'll join a high‑ownership team responsible for some of our most business‑critical infrastructure, and you'll help the engineers around you do their best work.

Salary range

• Zone 1 (New York and San Francisco) - $213,000 to $246,000*
• Zone 2 (all other locations in the US and Canada) - $192,000 to $246,000*

Location

We are primarily a remote company with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe. Our HQ is in New York city.

About The Team

This team is tasked with evaluating our core operations workflow from first principles. They architect and deliver an extensible insurance workflow pipeline that automates the back office with best‑in‑class precision/recall, automation, and evals for continuous improvement.

Ownership areas: Central evals framework.

What you'll do

• Lead the scoping, design, and delivery of complex backend systems in Python on AWS: services, data models, and asynchronous pipelines.
• Build and scale LLM-based systems that process large volumes of unstructured documents and data with precision and explainability.
• Design external‑facing APIs and integrations with third‑party systems that customers depend on.
• Own database and query performance as data volume grows; proactively manage technical debt.
• Contribute to architectural discussions and decisions across the entire product, and iterate with teams to modify and prioritize within the development effort.
• Accurately estimate your work, consistently meet deadlines, and help others estimate theirs.
• Take a leading role in incident and bug resolution; be the strong debugger others turn to.
• Lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment.
• Mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback.
• Use AI tooling deliberately to multiply your own output and quality.

About You

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Know Python (our main stack), though we're open to strong candidates from other OO backgrounds.
• Experience with AWS and serverless technologies (Lambda, Step Functions), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases and their performance tuning, ideally PostgreSQL.
• Mastery of software development fundamentals: system design, debugging, testing, and problem-solving.
• Experience building external‑facing APIs or designing integrations with third‑party systems.
• You take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
• You communicate proactively: surfacing blockers, asking the right questions, keeping stakeholders in the loop.
• You thrive on experimentation: comfortable testing ideas, measuring results, and iterating quickly on problems no one has solved before.
• You're excited by problems others are struggling with.

Bonus points for

• Experience working with LLMs in production and an understanding of what it takes to deploy them at scale.
• Experience with document pipelines and processing large amounts of data.
• Experience with distributed systems.
• Experience in insurance, fintech, or another data-heavy regulated domain.

What you'll get

• Competitive salary (based on experience level)*.
• Significant equity options package.
• 20 days of PTO a year.
• Global team offsites (2024 - Lisbon, 2025 - Cartagena, 2026 - Tbilisi).
• Healthy living/gym stipend.
• Mobile phone bill stipend.
• Continuing education credits.
• For US employees only:
• 100% covered medical, 100% covered vision and dental for individuals and families.
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution (regardless of employee contribution)

https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/