Senior Backend Engineer (AI Product)

Gismart is seeking a seasoned Senior Backend Engineer to spearhead the engineering efforts for a groundbreaking new product. This is a unique opportunity to be the inaugural engineering hire, influencing the technical direction and owning the backend development lifecycle from conception to deployment. The company is embarking on the ambitious creation of an AI orchestration platform, designed to offer a unified interface and a single token balance across a diverse array of AI models. The initial focus for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) will be on image and video generation, with plans to expand into text chat and AI agents in subsequent phases.

About the Role

As the Senior Backend Engineer, you will be instrumental in building the core of this innovative AI orchestration system. This involves crafting a unified layer that seamlessly interacts with multiple AI providers. A critical aspect of this core will be its robustness, incorporating features like failover mechanisms, intelligent retries, effective rate limiting, and the ability to integrate new AI models rapidly, reducing onboarding time from weeks to mere days.

Furthermore, you will take full ownership of the API contracts that will be consumed by the Flutter client. This includes ensuring stability, managing versioning effectively, and implementing clear, actionable error handling to provide a smooth developer experience for the client-side team. You will also design and build the media pipeline responsible for storing and delivering generated assets, leveraging cloud storage solutions like S3 and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) while maintaining a keen eye on cost control.

The responsibilities for this pivotal role are extensive and directly contribute to the success of the new AI product:

• **Develop the Orchestration Core:** Construct the central engine that manages interactions with various AI services, ensuring resilience and efficient operation.
• **Own API Contracts:** Define, implement, and maintain the APIs that the front-end application will use, prioritising stability and ease of integration.
• **Build the Media Pipeline:** Establish a system for handling image and video assets, from storage to delivery, with a focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• **Ensure System Reliability:** Implement comprehensive monitoring, including metrics, tracing, and per-provider alerting, to guarantee the system can handle significant traffic loads, especially during peak periods.
• **Implement Usage Accounting:** Develop a system to track the cost of AI generations accurately, integrate with the primary billing service, and ensure secure, non-duplicative charging.
• **Design Asynchronous Generation:** Create a robust pipeline for handling long-running AI generation tasks, managing job queues, processing provider webhooks, guaranteeing delivery, and recovering from potential failures.

What They're Looking For

Gismart is seeking a highly experienced backend developer with a proven track record in building scalable and reliable systems. The ideal candidate will possess:

• A minimum of four years of commercial backend development experience.
• Strong proficiency in Go, or substantial backend expertise in another statically typed language such as Java, Kotlin, C#, Rust, or TypeScript, coupled with a genuine willingness to transition to Go from the outset.
• Demonstrable experience in designing and implementing backend services that operate under real-world production loads, with a deep understanding of architectural trade-offs and sound decision-making principles.
• Excellent API design skills, comfortable with both REST and gRPC, with a focus on maintainability, backward compatibility, and designing APIs for mobile application consumption.
• Hands-on experience integrating with third-party APIs, including managing complexities like retries, idempotency, rate limiting, and gracefully handling partial failures.
• A solid grasp of PostgreSQL, including its nuances concerning transactions, isolation levels, indexing, and maintaining data integrity.
• Familiarity with asynchronous processing and messaging systems, such as SQS, Redis, Kafka, or Temporal.
• Experience working with cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, Docker, and modern CI/CD practices.
• Practical experience with observability tools and methodologies, including metrics, logging, tracing, and the ability to independently troubleshoot production issues.

For engineers in South Africa considering a role like this, backend development, particularly in cloud-native environments and with in-demand languages like Go, is a well-compensated field. Typical employers range from established tech companies and financial institutions to burgeoning startups and product development agencies. Career progression often involves moving into more senior technical leadership roles, architectural positions, or management tracks, with opportunities to specialise in areas like AI infrastructure and distributed systems.

• 4+ years of commercial experience in backend development.
• Strong experience with Go, or solid backend expertise in another statically typed language (Java, Kotlin, C#, Rust, or TypeScript) with a willingness to transition to Go from day one.
• Hands-on experience designing and building backend services that operate under real production load, with a solid understanding of architectural trade-offs and decision-making.
• Strong API design skills (REST, gRPC) with a focus on maintainability, backward compatibility, and building APIs consumed by mobile applications.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs, including handling retries, idempotency, rate limiting, and graceful recovery from partial failures.
• Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL, including transactions, isolation levels, indexing, and maintaining data consistency.
• Experience with asynchronous processing and messaging systems such as SQS, Redis, Kafka, Temporal, or similar technologies.
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), Docker, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical experience with observability tools and practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, and independently debugging production issues.