Senior Backend Engineer

Backend EngineerWe're a bootstrapped GenAI platform serving image and video generation at real scale — Fortune 500 clients, $35M+ ARR, and traffic that doesn't wait for you to catch up. We need a backend engineer who thinks in systems, not just services. You'll own the architecture behind our generation pipelines, inference orchestration, and the infrastructure that keeps latency low while volume climbs.This is a hands-on architect role. You will design and write code, not just draw diagrams.What you'll doDesign and own backend systems that handle high-throughput, asynchronous workloads (generation queues, worker orchestration, media processing)Architect for scale and reliability — you'll make the calls on data flow, service boundaries, and failure handlingBuild and optimize async pipelines: job queuing, retries, backpressure, dead-letter handling, and everything that keeps millions of requests movingImprove performance and cost at the infrastructure level — inference is expensive, and efficiency is a product feature hereSet technical direction and raise the engineering bar for the team through review and mentorshipWhat we're looking forStrong backend experience (5+ years) with real ownership of production systems at scaleProven system design skills — you can defend your architecture decisions with tradeoffs, not buzzwordsHands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar), and distributed workersComfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environmentsAbility to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environmentNice to haveExperience with Go (or willingness to work in it — we lean on Go for backend)Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelinesTrack record contributing to open source (we look at GitHub signal)Why ImagineArtReal revenue, real users, no VC treadmill — decisions are made by engineers and founders, fastGenuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of AI and scaleFully remote, full-time