Staff Backend Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer

WAG is transforming how art and collectibles are valued, managed, and traded. Born from the merger of Winston Art Group (the largest independent appraisal and advisory firm in the U.S.) and Artory (a pioneer in art tokenization), we combine deep industry expertise with technologies like AI and blockchain to modernize a $2.9 trillion global asset class.

We're already generating significant revenue and recently raised our Series A from top-tier VCs. Now, we're building the next-generation platform to unlock liquidity, trust, and intelligence in the art market—and we're looking for exceptional engineers to help us do it.

Why Join Us

• Meaningful equity and competitive compensation
• High-impact role at a growing company with revenue, funding, and a compelling vision
• Build at the intersection of art, fintech, AI, and blockchain
• A collaborative, pragmatic team that values speed, clarity, and technical quality
• Remote-flexible culture with an HQ in NYC
• Backed by top VCs and trusted by leading collectors, advisors, and institutions

About the role

Location

US Remote (East Coast or Central time-zone required). For candidates in NY or Miami, an interview may be conducted in person.

The Role

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to be the technical leader and architect of our backend systems. As one of the first engineering hires, you'll own the entire backend architecture—from foundational infrastructure and API design to AI-driven data pipelines and system scalability. This is a tech lead role: you'll set technical direction, mentor future backend hires, and establish the engineering culture and standards that will scale with the company.

Reporting & Collaboration:

You'll report directly to our Head of Engineering, a highly hands-on technical leader who you'll partner closely with on architecture decisions and technical strategy. Together, you'll co-own the backend vision—balancing immediate product needs with long-term scalability. Our Head of Engineering is deeply involved in code, design reviews, and technical discussions, so you'll have a close working relationship focused on building world-class systems.

You'll also work closely with our CPO (Chief Product Officer) and company leadership to translate product vision into robust, scalable systems. This isn't just about writing code—it's about making architectural decisions, evaluating tradeoffs, and building systems that can evolve as we grow the engineering team.

This is an AI-native environment. We move fast using tools like Cursor and Claude Code, build with LLM APIs from OpenAI and others, and actively leverage AI in our product and development workflows. If you're excited about being a technical leader who ships production software with AI as a core tool, you'll thrive here.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership & Architecture:

• Own the entire backend architecture from day one—make the critical decisions on frameworks, databases, infrastructure, and patterns
• Define technical standards and best practices for code quality, testing, documentation, and deployment
• Lead system design for complex problems involving data ingestion, LLM orchestration, and real-time analytics
• Mentor and guide future backend engineers as the team grows (you'll likely hire and lead 2-3 backend engineers in your first year)
• Evaluate and adopt new technologies that improve velocity, reliability, or capabilities

Hands-On Development:

• Build and scale core backend systems to ingest, clean, and serve structured data at scale
• Design clean, performant APIs to power our client portal, data tools, and internal services
• Integrate and orchestrate LLM APIs (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, open-source models) for use in appraisal automation, data extraction, and insight generation
• Architect event-driven systems and asynchronous pipelines (queues, pub/sub) for reliability and scale
• Own our infrastructure including CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and IaC (Terraform, AWS)

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Co-own technical vision with Head of Engineering: collaborate daily on architecture, technical roadmap, and engineering standards
• Partner closely with CPO and product team to shape roadmap based on technical feasibility and effort
• Collaborate with data and frontend engineers to define APIs, contracts, and integration patterns
• Work with company leadership (Head of Engineering, CPO, President) on technical strategy, hiring, and long-term platform vision
• Communicate technical decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders

You Might Be a Fit If...

Required:

• Education: B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent
• Experience: 7+ years of backend engineering experience with at least 2+ years in a technical lead, staff, or principal role at a high-growth startup or product company
• Leadership: Proven track record of mentoring engineers, leading technical initiatives, and making architectural decisions that scale
• Technical Skills:
• Expert in Python with deep understanding of performance, concurrency, and design patterns
• Strong database expertise (PostgreSQL or similar) including query optimization, schema design, and data modeling
• Hands-on experience with LLM/AI integration in production systems—you've shipped features using OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, message queues, and async patterns (Celery, Kafka, SQS, etc.)
• Production experience with AWS (or GCP/Azure) including compute, storage, networking, and managed services
• Strong DevOps fundamentals: Docker, Kubernetes/ECS, Terraform, CI/CD, monitoring/observability
• Data engineering fluency: ETL/ELT patterns, data lakes vs. warehouses, pipeline orchestration
• Mindset:
• You balance pragmatism with technical excellence—you know when to move fast and when to invest in infrastructure
• You have a bias toward simplicity and can articulate tradeoffs clearly
• You're excited about AI tooling and actively use tools like Cursor, Claude, or Copilot to increase velocity
• You thrive in ambiguity and can chart technical direction with incomplete information

Preferred:

• Experience building 0→1 products at early-stage startups (seed through Series B)
• Prior tech lead or staff engineer experience at a Series A+ company
• Experience with ML/AI model deployment and managing inference costs/latency
• Familiarity with data warehousing (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and analytics tools
• Domain knowledge in art, collectibles, fintech, or fragmented asset classes
• Experience hiring and building teams (you'll be involved in hiring future backend engineers)
• Ability to occasionally travel to our NYC office

We Offer Great Benefits, Including:

A Welcoming Team

• A friendly, international, agile team that works together with cutting-edge technologies
• Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick days, and holidays
• Paid parental leave (maternity, paternity, adoption, leave)
• Paid volunteer days to encourage community involvement
• Collaborative, innovative, and inclusive company culture
• Employee recognition and appreciation programs
• Team-building activities and social events
• Transparent communication and feedback channels

Competitive Compensation

• Competitive salary based on experience and skills
• Discretionary performance-based bonuses
• Equity option grants of company shares, offering alignment with company success

Health, Wellness, and Benefits

• Comprehensive