#5 - Senior Backend Engineer - Python & Azure Databricks

🚀 Join Our Remote Data Products & Machine Learning Startup! 🚀

At Muttdata, we build innovative Data Products and Machine Learning solutions that help companies solve complex business challenges. As a fast-growing, remote-first startup, we’re passionate about technology, collaboration, and continuous learning.

We are looking for an experienced, hands-on, and ownership-driven Backend Engineer (Advanced) to join our team 🐶🚀. In this role you will design, build, and operate production-grade backend services and REST APIs with Python and FastAPI on Microsoft Azure, including a communications dispatch service that integrates messaging queues and external APIs such as Braze.

You will work closely with development, data, and IT/DevOps teams, integrating backend services with Azure components, relational databases, third-party APIs, and data processes running on platforms like Databricks. Reliability, observability, and clean, maintainable code are at the core of this role.

🚀 What We Do

• Leveraging our expertise, we build modern Machine Learning systems for demand planning and budget forecasting.
• Developing scalable data infrastructures, we enhance high-level decision-making, tailored to each client.
• Offering comprehensive Data Engineering and custom AI solutions, we optimize cloud-based systems.
• Using Generative AI, we help e-commerce platforms and retailers create higher-quality ads, faster.
• Building deep learning models, we enhance visual recognition and automation for various industries, improving product categorization, quality control, and information retrieval.
• Developing recommendation models, we personalize user experiences in e-commerce, streaming, and digital platforms, driving engagement and conversions.

🌟 Our Partnerships

• Amazon Web Services
• Astronomer
• Databricks

🌟 Our Values

• 📊 We are Data Nerds
• 🤗 We are Open Team Players
• 🚀 We Take Ownership
• 🌟 We Have a Positive Mindset
  🔍 Curious about what we’re up to? Check out our case studies and dive into our blog post to learn more about our culture and the exciting projects we’re working on! 🚀

Responsibilities 🤓

• Design, develop, and evolve backend services and REST APIs with Python and FastAPI, applying best practices in architecture, security, and maintainability.
• Build and operate the communications dispatch service, integrating message queues and external APIs (Braze) with idempotency, retries, rate limiting, and robust error handling.
• Integrate and orchestrate platform components, including Azure services, databases, third-party APIs, and data processes running on platforms like Databricks.
• Design and maintain persistence solutions in Azure SQL, including data modeling, migrations, data integrity, and query optimization.
• Ensure backend reliability and observability in production through monitoring, tracing, automated testing, and failure recovery mechanisms.
• Collaborate with development, data, and IT/DevOps teams on technical decisions, component integration, CI/CD pipelines, and deployments across environments.
• Maintain clear and up-to-date technical documentation.

Required Skills 🚀

• 3–5 years of experience in backend development, with demonstrable participation in building, integrating, and operating production services.
• Strong command of Python and experience building REST APIs with FastAPI or equivalent frameworks.
• Experience designing modular, maintainable software, applying SOLID principles, separation of concerns, and automated testing best practices.
• Experience integrating APIs and distributed systems, including authentication, error handling, timeouts, retries, and resiliency patterns.
• Experience with asynchronous processing and messaging systems: queues, dead-letter handling, and idempotency (e.g., Azure Service Bus or equivalents).
• Strong SQL and relational database skills, including modeling, querying, migrations, and ORMs; SQL Server or Azure SQL preferred.
• Experience with Docker and deploying containerized services.
• Hands-on experience with cloud services, preferably Microsoft Azure, including monitoring, Git version control, and CI/CD processes.

Nice to Have 😉

• Experience integrating and orchestrating data processes from backend services, especially with Azure Databricks or other data processing platforms.
• Experience with containerized infrastructure in the cloud, including Kubernetes/AKS or Azure Container Registry.
• Experience with Braze or similar customer engagement platforms.

🎁 Perks

• Remote-first culture – work from anywhere! 🌍
• AWS, DBT, Google Cloud, Azure & Databricks certifications fully covered
• Birthday off + an extra vacation week (Mutt Week! 🏖️)
• Referral bonuses – help us grow the team & get rewarded!
• Maslow: Monthly credits to spend in our benefits marketplace.
• ✈️🏝️ Annual Mutters' Trip – an unforgettable getaway with the team!