Senior Backend Engineer

About LearnWise AI We’re an AI-first startup helping universities and colleges support students and faculty with smart, knowledge-driven tools. Small team, high ownership, real user impact. LearnWise is a place where the best idea wins—no matter who says it—and where innovation and growth are in our DNA. You’ll work closely with our CTO, Head of Product, VP of Engineering, and engineering team to build product systems used by universities at scale. Why this role exists We need a senior backend engineer to help us build reliable, scalable backend systems for AI-powered products used by universities and colleges. This role is focused on backend engineering, integrations, APIs, authentication, and service design. You will work close to AI product surfaces, but this is not primarily an AI/ML research role. What you’ll do Build backend systems for LearnWise productsDesign and implement services that support our core product experience.Work on integrations with external systems, data flows, and internal platform capabilities.Build systems where reliability, security, and observability matter.Design APIs and servicesCreate clean APIs, service boundaries, data models, and async workflows.Build maintainable backend services that other engineers can confidently use and extend.Improve and stabilize existing systems as the product and customer base grow.Support secure, enterprise-ready product developmentWork with authentication, authorization, permissions, and secure service-to-service communication.Help meet customer expectations around access control, auditability, reliability, and data protection.Collaborate across product and engineeringWork closely with Product, Design, AI, and Engineering to turn customer needs into practical technical solutions.Clarify scope, identify risks, propose trade-offs, and ship iteratively.Debug production issues across backend services, infrastructure, integrations, and third-party systems. Non-negotiable requirements You are a strong senior backend engineer who can take ownership of complex product systems.You have significant experience building and maintaining production backend services.You have hands-on experience with system integrations, including third-party APIs, data synchronization, webhooks, error handling, retries, and operational monitoring.You understand authentication and authorization patterns, such as SSO, OAuth/OIDC, JWTs, role-based access control, service-to-service auth, or similar.You have designed and built APIs and microservices used by real customers or other engineering teams.You can reason about data models, service boundaries, async workflows, failure modes, and backward-compatible changes.You are pragmatic: you can design new systems from scratch, but you are also happy to do the implementation work needed to get things shipped.You have strong written and spoken English.You can work independently in a remote, async-first environment. Important, but with some wiggle room Our current stack is Python, FastAPI, MongoDB, AWS, Docker, and modern CI/CD tooling. Experience with this stack is strongly preferred. That said, we are open to strong backend engineers who have worked with similar technologies and can become productive very quickly in our stack. For example: Python/FastAPI, or similar backend frameworks and languages.MongoDB, or similar document databases / NoSQL systems.AWS, or comparable cloud platforms such as GCP or Azure.Event-driven, async, or distributed service architectures.Production observability: logs, metrics, tracing, alerts, and debugging live systems. Nice to have Experience with Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, HubSpot, or other CRM integrations.Experience with SSO / enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Entra.Experience with messaging channels such as WhatsApp, SMS, email automation, or live chat platforms.Experience building customer-support, helpdesk, ticketing, inbox, or workflow products.Experience with AI-powered products, LLM APIs, RAG systems, or agentic workflows.Experience in a high-growth startup or small, fast-moving product team. How we work Open, asynchronous communication: communication happens in public channels by default. We have few meetings and rely heavily on async communication.Small team, big ownership: you’ll own features and systems end-to-end. We do not micromanage, but we do expect people to drive their work forward.Quality and speed: delivering real value to customers matters. We care about quality, reliability, and maintainability, but we also move fast and make pragmatic trade-offs.Strong team spirit: we’re a team full of people who care deeply about what they’re building and about helping each other succeed. Location & schedule Full-time role.Remote is OK; Europe is a must-have.Flexible schedule and a no strict 9–5 mentality, with real respect for work–life balance. Compensation & benefits €60,000 - €90,000 depending on skills and experienceFlexible working arrangements, including remote work within Europe.Focus on work–life balance, not clock-watching.Opportunity to build impactful technology for higher education.Join team meet-ups globally, including company offsites. Hiring process Intro chat (15–20 min): quick conversation to learn more about you and the role.Take-home exercise: candidates who pass the intro call receive a practical backend exercise focused on API design, integrations, and production-oriented problem solving.Solution review + technical interview (90 min): candidates with the strongest submissions are invited to a combined interview covering the take-home walkthrough, a small live-coding extension, and deeper technical questions e.g. on Python model changes, authentication, and API design.Culture/leadership chat (30 min): meet another founder or leader to ensure mutual fit.Offer.