Backend Engineer

What's Orchestra? Orchestra is an AI infrastructure company and we are the creators of Orchestra - the Control Plane for Data and AI. Data teams are overturning how they do their day-to-day. More people than ever want to use AI and Data to automate. But data teams still spend thousands of manual hours manually moving data, integrating tools, and firefighting ad-hoc requests. We’re solving that problem in massive enterprises like Experian and Octopus Energy, and are hiring for the team to scale our growth. Building the Orchestra platform was the first step, but our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you're excited to solve some of AI’s biggest problems, build a generational company, and do it within a friendly, hard-working, talented, but humble team, then Orchestra is for you. Engineering at Orchestra We care deeply about our users, their pain points and experienceWe're a small team of generalists who embrace new challenges regularlyWe're united by our mission, focused execution, and speedWe deploy to production multiple times a day, every change goes through peer code review and automated CI before it ships, and we verify it in a live environment before releaseWe run a genuine continuous-improvement loop, not just a slogan: monthly retros, and we actively track our own lead time and deployment frequency, constantly asking whether the way we build could be faster or betterTech debt isn't an afterthought, every planning cycle guarantees at least one tech debt item gets worked Tech Stack Backend: Python (FastAPI) + Typescript (express)Infrastructure: AWS (serverless!), terraformContainerisation: DockerDatabase: PostgreSQL + DynamoDBCI/CD: GitHub actions + Blacksmith runnersFrontend: React + TypescriptStorybook for our component library‍ Role Mission Engineers at Orchestra are not just building endpoints, you will own the orchestration engine end-to-end, and you're expected to write code wherever it is needed to ensure the feature reaches production quickly. You will be working alongside the best engineers in the world to solve real problems on a day-to-day basis. You will ship systems that go directly into Orchestra, the control plane data and platform teams at companies like Octopus Energy and Experian run in production. This is a role for engineers who want to work alongside the best people they've ever worked with, who can move fast in production, and who want to own the problem most people don't think about until it breaks: making sure the thing underneath never does. What You'll Accomplish Own the orchestration engine: scheduling, execution, state, retries, concurrency and cancellation, the machinery that decides what runs, when, and what happens when it doesn't. Python and FastAPI on AWS, shipped to production multiple times a dayDesign for load that isn't smooth: capacity, back-pressure and isolation for a system whose busiest minute looks nothing like its average oneBuild the AI-native layer: agents are where our hardest and least-solved problems are right now, and where a lot of the next year of the product gets builtOwn your infrastructure: there's no separate platform team to hand things to. You'll write the terraform, watch what you ship, and fix it when it's wrongShip end-to-end: you'll drive features from idea through to production, not hand off design or QA to someone elseWork directly with customers: you'll sit close to the people running real workloads on the platform, debugging the genuinely interesting failures with them rather than reading a ticketInfluence product direction: your read on what's fragile, what's missing, and what customers actually need will shape what we build nextHelp shape how we build: as a small engineering team, you'll have a real say in our culture, our standards, and how we work, not just the code you ship Exceptional Candidates Have Demonstrated Real depth in Python: you've run production services in it, not just scripts. You've hit its edges, made real architecture calls, and know why certain patterns exist rather than just following themJudgment about distributed systems: retries, idempotency, at-least-once delivery, state machines, queues, race conditions that only show up under load. You've debugged the sort of failure that only happens in production, and you design for it nowComfort owning infrastructure: you've worked in a cloud environment and you treat infrastructure as part of the job rather than someone else's. Experience with IaC and serverless architectures is a real advantageData modelling instinct: you can explain why a piece of state belongs in Postgres rather than DynamoDB, and you've been on the wrong side of that call at least onceA bias to shipping: you know the difference between a fix that takes five minutes and a problem worth pausing on, and you don't gold-plate the former chasing an elegant solution nobody asked forA hunger to keep growing: backend is where you're strongest today, not where you plan to stay forever. We're generalists, and the interesting problems don't respect the boundaryA commercial instinct: you understand that what you ship affects real customers, and you've built relationships with the people who use your work, not just shipped into a void