Senior Backend Engineer

About The Role Optery helps people get their personal data off broker sites. We're a fully remote team, headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer who'll work directly with the founders on product and technical direction. This position is open to candidates based in Latin America. The role is backend-focused: Python and Django, with light frontend work when it makes sense (HTMX, the occasional React component). You own features start to finish, including the unglamorous part where you make sure the thing works in production a week after it ships. What you'd work on in your first quarter You'd be writing code in our Django backend, which powers both the consumer dashboard and the B2B platform. Expect a mix of: New features for the APIs that power our consumer dashboard and customer reportingPerformance and reliability work in our Celery and RabbitMQ pipelinesIntegrations with third-party services like payment providers and identity providers (Stripe, WorkOS SSO)Code review, both giving and receiving, on a small backend team of other Senior Engineers We don't have a rigid roadmap of "first 30 days, first 60 days" because that's never how it actually plays out. You'd pick up real work in your first week. What we're looking for Required: 6+ years building production web applications3+ years with Python and DjangoWorking knowledge of CS fundamentals: data structures, concurrency, SQL, system designStrong written communication; comfortable working async across time zonesSelf-direction and follow-through Strong plus: DRF and/or django-ninjaCelery, RabbitMQ, Redis in productionPostgres tuning and query analysisKubernetes and AWSStripe, identity providers, or other third-party API integrationsHTMX, React, or bothBackground in consumer privacy or adjacent industries We expect engineers here to use AI coding assistants like Claude Code as part of normal day-to-day work. If you've spent time figuring out how to actually get value out of these tools, that's a real plus. How we work Two things matter more than any specific skill. The first is ownership. If your feature ships and breaks in production, you're the one who investigates. If a spec is ambiguous, you ask. If you see something off in a teammate's PR, you flag it instead of waiting for someone else to. The second is writing. Async-first work means most of our coordination happens in PR descriptions, Slack threads, and Jira tickets. We care about people who can write clearly, and who also know when it's time to give up on writing and just hop on a 15-minute call. Location and hours This role is open to candidates based in Latin America. We strongly prefer working hours that overlap with US Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific time zones, because we do a fair amount of real-time collaboration. Equal opportunity Optery values diversity and is an equal opportunity employer. We don't discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factors. Compensation Range: $65K - $95K