Backend Engineer, Core Systems

Responsibilities

• ▹Design, build and operate the backend systems that power Midjourney
• ▹Own meaningful parts of the platform from schema to service to deployment and production health
• ▹Build the tooling and observability that help the team understand production before something breaks
• ▹Respond to production issues and turn each one into a lasting improvement
• ▹Simplify systems as they grow by reducing complexity and building durable abstractions
• ▹Partner closely with inference, infrastructure and product engineers as the platform evolves
• ▹Ship code that reaches production quickly

Requirements

• ▹Built and operated production backend systems under real traffic
• ▹Comfortable designing APIs, modeling data and working across services rather than inside a single layer
• ▹Thinks about failure modes before they happen and builds systems that behave well under load
• ▹Comfortable owning production, including debugging, observability and operational tooling
• ▹Enjoys making complex systems simpler
• ▹AI tools are part of your development workflow
• ▹Communicates clearly and works well with engineers across different disciplines

Nice to have

• ▹Experience operating Postgres or similarly load-bearing data stores at scale, including schema evolution under live traffic
• ▹Experience with high-throughput async job systems (queues, schedulers, workers)
• ▹Background designing the seam between a product backend and an ML inference platform
• ▹Familiarity with HPC and fleet orchestration concepts (Slurm, Ansible, multi-region operations)

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Compensation: $175,000-$200,000 + benefits
• ▹Flexible location; London or San Francisco preferred, strong remote candidates welcome
• ▹Speed of a startup with the resources of a research lab: no investors, no quarterly reporting cycle
• ▹Tiny team, large ambitions - decisions show up in production within days

About the company

Midjourney is a small, self-funded research lab exploring new mediums of thought at the intersection of design, human infrastructure and AI.