Senior Backend Engineer / Architect
- Role
- Backend
- Experience
- Senior
- Employment
- Full-time
Open to CN only. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
Senior backend engineer/architect with 5+ years owning production systems at scale. Needs strong system design, async pipelines, message queues, distributed workers, and high-throughput backend experience. Remote full-time role hiring in China.
Core skills
Optional skills
Senior Backend Engineer / Architect ImagineArt · Remote · Full-Time
About the role
We're a bootstrapped GenAI platform serving image and video generation at real scale — Fortune 500 clients, $35M+ ARR, and traffic that doesn't wait for you to catch up. We need a backend engineer who thinks in systems, not just services. You'll own the architecture behind our generation pipelines, inference orchestration, and the infrastructure that keeps latency low while volume climbs.
This is a hands-on architect role. You will design and write code, not just draw diagrams.
What you'll do
- Design and own backend systems that handle high-throughput, asynchronous workloads (generation queues, worker orchestration, media processing)
- Architect for scale and reliability — you'll make the calls on data flow, service boundaries, and failure handling
- Build and optimize async pipelines: job queuing, retries, backpressure, dead-letter handling, and everything that keeps millions of requests moving
- Improve performance and cost at the infrastructure level — inference is expensive, and efficiency is a product feature here
- Set technical direction and raise the engineering bar for the team through review and mentorship
What we're looking for
- Strong backend experience (5+ years) with real ownership of production systems at scale
- Proven system design skills — you can defend your architecture decisions with tradeoffs, not buzzwords
- Hands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar), and distributed workers
- Comfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environments
- Ability to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environment
Nice to have
- Experience with Go (or willingness to work in it — we lean on Go for backend)
- Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelines
- Track record contributing to open source (we look at GitHub signal)
Why ImagineArt
- Real revenue, real users, no VC treadmill — decisions are made by engineers and founders, fast
- Genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of AI and scale
- Fully remote, full-time
What you'll do
- Design and own backend systems that handle high-throughput, asynchronous workloads, including generation queues, worker orchestration, and media processing.
- Architect for scale and reliability, making calls on data flow, service boundaries, and failure handling.
- Build and optimize async pipelines, including job queuing, retries, backpressure, dead-letter handling, and keeping millions of requests moving.
- Improve performance and cost at the infrastructure level.
- Set technical direction and raise the engineering bar for the team through review and mentorship.
- Design and write code hands-on, not just diagrams.
What they require
- Strong backend experience with 5+ years of real ownership of production systems at scale.
- Proven system design skills and ability to defend architecture decisions with tradeoffs.
- Hands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues, and distributed workers.
- Comfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environments.
- Ability to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environment.
- Preferred: Experience with Go or willingness to work in it.
- Preferred: Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelines.
- Preferred: Track record contributing to open source.
Benefits
- Fully remote, full-time.
- Real revenue, real users, no VC treadmill.
- Decisions are made by engineers and founders, fast.
- Genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of AI and scale.
Bootstrapped GenAI platform serving image and video generation at real scale, with Fortune 500 clients, $35M+ ARR, and high traffic.