Sr. Backend Engineer - Python

About LearnWise AIWe’re an AI-first startup helping universities and colleges support students and faculty with smart, knowledge-driven tools. Small team, high ownership, real user impact. LearnWise is a place where the best idea wins—no matter who says it—and where innovation and growth are in our DNA.You’ll work closely with our Head of AI, CTO, and Head of Product.Why this role existsWe’re building out the backend and infrastructure that powers our AI assistants and student engagement tools. We need an engineer who loves writing and scaling backend systems from the API layer down to the database and infrastructure level. Someone who can design solid APIs, data flows, and services, and then wire them up to LLMs, RAG pipelines, and experimentation frameworks.This role is about making the backend powering our AI reliable, observable, and production-ready.Important: this is NOT an AI/ML role. You will be working with the AI team, and interface with AI systems daily - but 95% of the work with squarely fall under the “backend development” bucket!What you’ll doBuild, maintain and scale backend services for AI features. Implement, maintain and scale Python/FastAPI services that power our chat assistants and student-facing workflows.Optimize, refactor, and stabilize essential systems across the stack. We’re transitioning from a fast-moving early startup to a high-growth scale-up - you’ll help ease our growing pains.Testing, observability & reliability: Help improve our guardrails and observability: logging, tracing, and alerts for AI features and backend services.Help debug tricky production issues and sift through the noise to identify and resolve the root causes.Experimentation & iteration: Work with AI, Product, and Design to ship experiments fast and measure their impact.Propose and prototype new backend or AI capabilities that meaningfully improve our product and internal tooling.Startup-style ad-hoc workJump in on bug-fixes, internal tooling, or data tasks when needed.Help improve our developer experience, CI/CD, and internal docsNon-negotiable requirements:You are smart, pragmatic, and love building backend systems.You understand that there are two sides (https://juraj.blog/p/two-sides) to software engineering and work comfortably in both.You can operate both as owner and as executor. At times we need a new system designed from scratch - at others, we just need to add another API integration. You enjoy doing the grunt work (sometimes!).STRONG ASYNC PYTHON skills, and solid understanding of advanced python concepts and libraries such as: event loops, async generators, anyio streams, decorators, generics, etc.Experience with FastAPI (or similar modern Python web frameworks).Extensive experience in MongoDB.Deep familiarity with the terminal, your IDE of choice, and git.4+ years of experience in a Software Development position. This does not include data science, MLE, devops, and other adjacent fields.Professional fluency in English (written & spoken).Important, but with some wiggle room:Solid experience designing and maintaining backend APIs and services (HTTP APIs, auth, error handling, etc.).Familiarity with cloud environments (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) and common dev tooling (Docker, CI/CD).A demonstrable level of mastery of AI tooling. We’re not looking for vibe coders. We expect you to know when and how to leverage AI.Self-driven, highly motivated, and excited about improving higher education with technology!Nice to haveBasic frontend experience is a big plusExperience shipping LLM-based features to production (chat, RAG, agents, tools).Worked with vector stores, embeddings, and retrieval (e.g. for search or question-answering).Exposure to observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging stacks - in particular logfire and/or opentelemetry).Prior experience in a high-growth startup or small, fast-moving product team.How we workOpen, asynchronous communication: all communication happens in public channels by default. We have very few meetings and rely on async communication.Strong team spirit: we’re a team full of fantastic humans. Everyone at LearnWise loves and cares deeply about what they’re doing. If you’ve only worked at corporate jobs, the experience can be overwhelming 😉Small team, big ownership: you’ll own features and systems end-to-end. We don’t hold hands or micromanage. We make sure everyone has the support they need to thrive and deliver their best.Quality and speed: “good enough” is often better than perfect. Delivering real value to our customers is often more important than pristine coding practices. We do have refactor-parties sometimes :)Location & scheduleFull-time role.Remote is OK; ideally in our hubs in Amsterdam, Barcelona, or Vilnius.We’re especially happy if you’re around Amsterdam or open to occasional in-person meet-ups.Flexible schedule and a “no strict 9–5” mentality, with real respect for work–life balance.Compensation & benefitsCompetitive salary.Flexible working arrangements, including remote work within Europe.Focus on work–life balance, not clock-watching.Opportunity to build cutting-edge AI technology and make a real impact in EdTech.Join team meet-ups globally (e.g. our offsites like Costa Brava).Hiring processIntro chat (15–20 min): quick conversation with our Head of AI or CTO to learn more about you and the role.Technical Interview (45-60 min): technical knowledge questionsPractical exercise or pairing session (45–60 min): focused on backend/API design and integrating an AI/RAG component.Culture/leadership chat (30 min): meet another founder or leader to ensure mutual fit.Offer.