[Remote] Backend Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. AlphaSignal is building the intelligence layer for AI, focusing on real-time data and machine-readable insights. The Backend Engineer will own the infrastructure and pipelines that support the AI platform and a large subscriber newsletter, ensuring reliability and performance of the code base.

Responsibilities

• You'll own the pipeline behind the platform: scrapers, an LLM enrichment and editorial layer, a MongoDB data layer, a ranking system that decides what matters, and the foundations of our knowledge graph
• You're responsible for the code feeding a product used by over a million people a month
• When throughput drops or something breaks, you diagnose it, ship the fix, and verify the recovery
• You're a team of 10. You see a problem, you fix it

Skills

• 3+ years of backend engineering with production ownership of a non-trivial system - you got paged when it broke
• Python at a professional level - backend services, ML models, algorithms, and production-grade diagnostic scripting
• Deep LLM fluency across providers (Claude, GPT, Gemini) - shipped production features, fluent with prompting, structured output, cost optimization, and failure modes. You treat prompts as engineering artifacts, not vibes
• Database depth - MongoDB, Postgres at scale, or comparable; indexes, query plans, atomicity, replication
• ML / vector search - recommendation systems, knowledge graphs, entity linking, and the full vector DB landscape (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector, Chroma, FAISS, plus Atlas/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch)
• Designed systems for large, growing traffic - caching, batching, async, and index tuning before things fall over
• AWS / infrastructure - comfortable deploying and operating services on EC2 and the broader Amazon suite
• Fluent with modern AI dev tooling (Cursor and similar)
• Solid engineering practices: observability, monitoring, ticketing, and keeping a codebase healthy as it scales. Ideally worked on a team of 5+ developers
• Experience at a high-traffic content platform (Medium, Substack, Reddit etc)
• Familiarity with arXiv, GitHub, Hugging Face, or X APIs
• Content systems: feeds, aggregators, recommenders
• Scraping at scale, deeper prompt engineering, or early-stage startup experience

Benefits

• Full ownership of a critical, high-impact system.
• Direct work with the founder.
• Real, visible impact in production — often within hours.
• Competitive compensation.
• Remote, async-first, low-meeting culture.

Company Overview