Backend Engineer

Backend EngineerDepartment: Engineering Employment Type: Full Time Location: San Francisco / Remote (USA) Description We're looking for a Backend Engineer to join Recentive's core engineering team. In this role, you'll architect and build flexible backend systems that support decision-making for leading organizations in sports, entertainment, and broadcast. You'll collaborate with engineers, data scientists, and client domain experts to design backend systems that prioritizes clarity, adaptability, and long-term maintainability. What You'll Be Doing Designing Flexible, Extensible Systems: Architecting Python-based backend systems using Django, Django Rest Framework, and Celery, built to support a growing suite of enterprise analytical tools and applications across multiple domains. Owning the Full Backend Lifecycle: Developing APIs, modeling relational databases, and supporting application performance through smart caching, observability, and CI/CD workflows. Product-Aware Engineering: Collaborating directly with stakeholders to understand business goals, gather context, and define system requirements. You'll help shape solutions that balance technical design with real-world constraints, often in areas where problem definitions are still emerging. Collaborative Systems Thinking: Translating data science and optimization workflows into production-ready services that are easy to maintain and modify, coordinated through formal processes of technical specs and review. What We're Looking For Backend Engineering Expertise: 7+ years of experience building backend systems in Python, with deep expertise in Django and Django Rest Framework, and a genuine enthusiasm for using these frameworks to craft elegant, reliable software. System Design and Architecture Skills: Experience designing systems that are easy to understand, extend, and compose, even when working with imperfect legacy code or evolving product needs. Async and Background Processing: Hands-on experience with Celery and building distributed systems that include asynchronous and long-running tasks. Comfort designing workflows with queues, retries, and failure handling. Cloud and Containerization: Proficiency with Docker, AWS, and Kubernetes, and an understanding of how to build backend systems that are cost-effective, observable, and production-ready. API and Data Layer Fluency: Experience developing RESTful APIs, working with PostgreSQL, and using tools like Redis and DynamoDB for caching and fast data access. Security and Authentication: Familiarity with OAuth2 and role-based access control. Experience integrating secure authentication flows and managing secrets responsibly. Self-Directed and Product-Aware: Ability to work through ambiguity, collaborate across functions, and make thoughtful engineering decisions without needing complete specs. Why Work at Recentive Impactful Work: Our technology and products directly shape operational strategies at leading sports teams and leagues, broadcasters, and other key players in the live events ecosystem. Forward Thinking: Design and build forward-thinking analytical solutions that blend creativity and engineering-leveraging advanced algorithms, optimization, and machine learning to solve complex, real-world challenges. Collaborative Culture: We're a growing, tight-knit data-centered team that values knowledge-sharing, learning, and innovation. Growth & Ownership: Shape your career as a technical leader while helping build next-generation analytical tools from the ground up. Just Getting Started: We've accomplished a lot but we're just in the early innings of where we'll go. Our new west-coast office in SF is a testament to that growth and will serve as a hub for our growing team.