• Strong backend experience (5+ years) with real ownership of production systems at scale
• Proven system design skills — you can defend your architecture decisions with tradeoffs, not buzzwords
• Hands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar), and distributed workers
• Comfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environments
• Ability to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environment
• Experience with Go (or willingness to work in it — we lean on Go for backend)
• Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelines
• Track record contributing to open source (we look at GitHub signal)