Founding Backend Engineer at zaimler

About UsWe are on a mission to bridge the gap between enterprise business knowledge and data, democratizing data discovery and curation to prepare organizations for the era of generative AI. Today's data tools are overly complex, poorly integrated, and siloed, forcing AI Practitioners and data scientists alike to spend more time wrestling with tools, relying on tribal knowledge, and navigating data lakes rather than doing meaningful data science work. The current landscape of data tools and processes is heavily manual and needs to catch up with the vast amount of data generated daily. With the advent of Gen AI and multi-modality, this challenge has only grown more complex and broken.Backed by top VC funds, we are committed to making enterprise data AI-ready faster, more reliably, and with a stronger foundation of factual semantic knowledge. This leads to more accurate models, superior outcomes, and better business results. Our team of seasoned data infrastructure and machine learning experts (from LinkedIn, Visa, Truera, Hive, and Branch) has spent the past two decades building bespoke systems to solve these very challenges.Join our growing team of ML research and data infrastructure experts. We're committed to empowering AI and data scientists to seamlessly integrate semantic learning with generative AI. Be part of our journey to shape the future of enterprise AI.About the roleWe are seeking a Backend Engineer with deep experience in microservices architecture to join our team. The ideal candidate will have expertise in building and operating distributed backend systems using technologies like Java, Ray, PostGres, and Kubernetes. In this role, you’ll be critical in designing, implementing, and scaling the core microservices that power our AI and data platform.You’ll help define service boundaries, build robust APIs, and ensure reliable communication across our ingestion, extraction, and knowledge graph systems. We're looking for someone who brings strong backend engineering fundamentals and a track record of delivering production-grade systems in fast-moving environments.What you’ll doDesign and implement core microservices that handle document ingestion, entity extraction, and graph constructionDefine and enforce clean service interfaces and communication protocols (e.g., gRPC, REST)Drive schema design and service ownership in a polyglot environment (Java + Rust)Contribute to deployment and runtime infrastructure (Helm, Kubernetes, vLLM, Ray)Build internal tooling and APIs that accelerate downstream teams working on retrieval and rankingHelp scale systems as we ingest more enterprise data and expand graph resolution logicYou’ll thrive in this role if youHave 4+ years of experience building backend services in modern cloud environmentsAre fluent in at least one strongly typed language (Rust, Java, etc.) and comfortable in dynamic ones (Python)Understand distributed systems, service discovery, and observability (we use OpenTelemetry + Grafana)Have experience implementing secure APIs and backend systems, including RBAC, authentication, and authorization patternsHave strong opinions on API boundaries, fault tolerance, and making systems boring (in a good way)Enjoy taking vague problems and turning them into clean, testable servicesAre comfortable working in a high-context, fast-moving startup environment with minimal overheadNice to haveExperience working with knowledge graphs, embeddings, or semantic searchFamiliarity with vLLM, Ray, or distributed compute runtimesBackground in data-intensive systems or working with unstructured inputsExposure to entity resolution, NER, or schema linking systems