Senior Backend Systems Engineer - AWS & Python

Seesaw Learning; United States; On-site; USD 173,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical & Dental

Vision Coverage

401(k) Match

Flexible PTO

Home Office Stipend

Professional Development

Parental Leave

Volunteer Days

Job summary

Seesaw Learning seeks a Senior Engineer for the Core Systems team to drive backend development at scale using Python (Tornado) and a cloud-first infrastructure. You will own API design, data storage interactions, and the platform's reliability across billions of requests per month.

You’ll collaborate with product managers and senior engineers to shape infrastructure as code and cost-efficient cloud strategies while maintaining strong security and observability practices.

Qualifications

• 7+ years experience with backend development; durable systems-thinking.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: eventual consistency, fan-in/out, backpressure.
• Proficiency with AWS core services (EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, ECS/EKS).
• CI/CD pipelines experience, preferably Github Actions.
• Self-starter capable of independent execution and owning vision.
• Proven experience owning and operating infrastructure at high scale.

Responsibilities

• Modify, diagnose, and change Python HTTP backend (Tornado) and data stores (Dynamo, Elasticsearch, Redis).
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code repo for AWS provisioning.
• Reason about distributed systems to drive technical decisions.
• Own technical work from inception to production monitoring and alerting.
• Export best practices on code, tooling, and observability.
• Ensure security and reliability of Seesaw's platform; address vulnerabilities and bottlenecks.
• Optimize cloud infrastructure for cost-effectiveness.
• Help develop a strong technical roadmap and engineering culture.
• Partner with senior team members, PMs, and stakeholders to align infra with business goals.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

AWS core services

CI/CD pipelines

Self‑starter

Production infra ownership

Tools

Python

Job description

Seesaw Learning seeks a Senior Engineer for the Core Systems team to drive backend development at scale using Python (Tornado) and a cloud-first infrastructure. You will own API design, data storage interactions, and the platform's reliability across billions of requests per month.

You’ll collaborate with product managers and senior engineers to shape infrastructure as code and cost-efficient cloud strategies while maintaining strong security and observability practices.