Staff Backend Engineer (Python)

About Playlab

Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI.

We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators & students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 60,000 educators have published apps on Playlab – and the impact is growing every day.

At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material - one that should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you’ll join us.

The Role

Playlab seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to join our growing Engineering team. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll be bridging cutting-edge AI technologies and production systems - taking emerging capabilities and building them into reliable, performant services that power real educational experiences.

Examples of the work

• Work with ML to design and build the agent runtime framework that powers goal-directed educational applications

• Build services that use fine-tuned models to automatically scaffold new apps from high-quality examples

• Design and implement systems for dynamic interface generation (chat to writing editor to interactive simulations)

• Implement RAG systems and knowledge graph integration for curriculum and educational content

• Build services for processing and analyzing educational conversations at scale

• And more…

Expectations

• Design, build, and maintain production Python services that power AI features with reliability and performance

• Stay on top of emerging frameworks and Python ecosystem - evaluate new tools that improve our capabilities

• Work cross-functionally with ML engineers, platform engineers, and product to ensure services meet real needs

• Balance experimentation with production excellence - prototype quickly with new techniques while ensuring production reliability

• Write comprehensive tests and documentation that make systems understandable and maintainable

• Mentor engineers on Python best practices, service design, and LLM integration patterns

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production web applications (Python systems)

• 3+ years building Python services at scale

• Experience building API services and microservices architecture

• Experience with FastAPI or similar modern Python frameworks

• Experience with data processing pipelines and working with databases

• Comfortable working with AI/ML engineers and understanding their needs

• Thrive in high-agency, high collaboration cultures

• Great communication that makes working remote-first work

Bonus Points For...

• Strong understanding of working with LLMs and AI APIs in production

• Background in agent frameworks or agentic AI systems

• Experience with RAG systems and vector databases

• Experience in education or building in edtech

• Experience with educational technology or mission-driven organizations

• Experience with designing creative platforms

Technologies

Python, FastAPI, OpenAI/Anthropic/Bedrock APIs, PostgreSQL, Neo4J, Vector Databases, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes