Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

About Encord

The success of any machine learning system relies on the quality of its training data, but building high quality datasets is too slow and too expensive. Encord is building the infrastructure to solve this problem. Our platform handles the indexing, curation and annotation of huge datasets, so that our customers can efficiently build datasets, train models, and deploy their AI systems.
As AI models become more powerful and capable, they can create more economic value by handling increasingly complex tasks - but only if they are suitably directed by human feedback. Expertly annotated data is the best way to do this, and Encord is well positioned to take advantage of a market which is growing extremely fast.

We are an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of multi-modal AI and are backed by $30M in Series B funding from top investors like CRV and Y Combinator. We have big plans ahead and are looking to rapidly expand our Engineering team over the course of this year.

Who you are

We’re looking for great engineers with experience in building the backend of highly performant systems that can handle very large volumes of unstructured and structured data. Customers use our platform to store, query, analyse and manipulate billions of items of data and we need to ensure that these operations are fast and reliable at massive scale.

For this role we are particularly interested in engineers with experience in both traditional relational database systems like PostgreSQL and also column-oriented analytics systems such as Clickhouse, and who have worked on large-scale systems in industries where reliability and performance are critical.

You'll join us at a crucial stage of accelerated development for the company, product and team. As part of a small, highly collaborative group, you'll be a key driver of progress on a core part of our product. You will operate with high degrees of autonomy and be expected to craft performant, reliable and maintainable solutions to challenging technical problems.

What to expect

- High performing team: You'll join the small team that has built a product that our customers love. Members of the team are veterans of both established companies and successful startups, and many are successful ex-founders. While the team is more than a sum of its parts, every member is impressive in their own right.
- Impact: Your work will have direct and tangible impact for customers and in turn noticeably affect the trajectory of the company.
- End-to-end ownership: You will be entrusted with end-to-end ownership of your projects. From product, design and architectural decisions, all the way to deployment, monitoring and measuring impact on users. We expect everyone to take initiative, be proactive in problem-solving, and continuously seek improvement.
- Autonomy and collaboration: You will often work autonomously to take charge of your projects, make decisions, and drive your work forward. But as a lean and high trust team, we remain quick to collaborate and support each other with challenging problems together.
- Scale and simplicity: You will tackle complex domains and immense scale with simple solutions. You'll leverage your expertise to solve challenging problems in simple ways.

About You

- You are experienced: You have seen a lot and built a lot. You have personally developed and maintained systems from scratch and you know the trade offs that are involved in building reliable, performant software at speed.
- You seek high impact: You want your work to have a tangible outcome for people. You're not satisfied when building products that do not see the light of day or move a number by a tenth of a percent.
- You are a builder: You enjoy all aspects of building not only software but a complete product. You enjoy problem solving and thinking from first principles and are ready to pick up new skills and build quickly.
- You are comfortable with uncertainty: You're happy to tackle problems without a predefined clear definition or obvious solution, and are excited to have autonomy to make decisions as you go.
- You are a team player: You understand that being a member of a high-performing team requires you to contribute your best work, but also for you to help others contribute their best. You enjoy lending a helping hand when needed and levelling up those around you.

Tech stack

Below is a detailed breakdown of all the technologies we use. We do not require you to have experience in all these technologies as long as you are open to learning. We currently use Python and Typescript across our codebase. Prior experience in these or similar technologies is appreciated but not required.

- Backend: Python and Rust
- Frontend: Typescript and React
- Kubernetes for deployment
- GCP for underlying infrastructure
- Database technologies: PostgreSQL, Clickhouse

What We Offer

- Competitive salary, commission and equity in a hyper growth AI company.
- Strong in-person culture: most of our team is in the office 3+ days a week.
- Room to grow into anything you choose — a year ago we were 50 people, now we're 100+. We'll be growing insanely fast over the next 24 months and you'll have all the opportunities for growth as you can handle.
- 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays.

Encord offers a unique opportunity to be part of a startup with a clear mission and vision - AI alignment. We are partnering with frontier AI labs, scale-ups raising billions in capital, and some of the world’s largest companies. AI will be the most impactful technology of our time. If you want to join us and work at the forefront of what’s possible in AI then please get in touch.