Senior Backend Engineer

Karya is building the data infrastructure for the next generation of AI. We work across languages and real-world contexts to create high-quality datasets and evaluations, while creating meaningful digital work for underserved communities.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to take ownership of important parts of our platform and help shape the next generation of Karya’s engineering infrastructure.

This is a role for someone who enjoys being given a difficult problem and figuring out how to solve it. You’ll work closely with the Head of Engineering and have significant autonomy over the systems you own, from architecture and implementation through production and iteration. 

What You'll Do 

Much of the infrastructure we build has constraints that are uncommon in conventional software systems.

Karya operates across multiple geographies, with different requirements, environments, and network conditions. Our systems need to work reliably even when connectivity is limited or intermittent, while still supporting a centralized platform that can scale across countries without becoming a collection of country-specific systems.

You’ll work on problems such as:

• Building backend infrastructure that can operate reliably across very different environments and geographies.
• Designing systems that cannot always assume a reliable network, including resilient data transfer and eventual synchronization.
• Evolving our existing architecture as the platform grows, making the right trade-offs between simplicity, performance, reliability, and scale.
• Building infrastructure and developer tooling that increases the leverage of the engineering team.
• Solving problems across APIs, data systems, distributed systems, integrations, performance, security, and reliability.

The interesting part is that there often isn't an established pattern to follow. You’ll need to understand the constraints, make good technical decisions, and build pragmatic solutions.

What You'll own

You’ll own meaningful product and technical areas end-to-end.

That means understanding the problem, shaping the solution, making architectural decisions, writing the code, getting it into production, and being responsible for what happens afterwards.

Over time, we expect you to take ownership of a significant product area or technical domain and materially improve it.

You’ll also have the opportunity to influence how the engineering team works: improving our internal infrastructure, tooling, and engineering practices so that the team can move faster while maintaining a high bar for quality.

You’ll work closely with product and engineering, contribute to technical direction, challenge requirements when appropriate, and help other engineers make better technical decisions.

What We are looking for

We’re looking for someone with roughly 5 years of software engineering experience. The number matters less than the depth of your experience and the ownership you've demonstrated.

You should have:

• 3-5 years of experience with backend engineering fundamentals
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and strong proficiency in Node.js.
• Good understanding of databases, including schema design, query optimization, and performance.
• A solid understanding of reliability, testing, security, and production engineering.
• Basic to intermediate understanding of distributed systems and scalability.
• The ability to understand an unfamiliar or complex codebase and make meaningful changes to it.
• Strong judgment when making technical trade-offs under ambiguity.
• The ability to move quickly without creating unnecessary operational or technical debt.
• The confidence to challenge requirements co