Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. AlphaSignal is building the intelligence layer for AI, creating a real-time, machine-readable map of everything happening in the field. The Backend Engineer will own the infrastructure and pipelines that power the AI platform and ensure the system operates smoothly for over a million users.
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 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