Backend Engineer - Data & Orchestration

Melotech is revolutionizing media and entertainment by creating art through technology for humans to enjoy. In just 24 months, their work has been enjoyed for over 3 billion minutes worldwide.

The Role

Everything Melotech ships runs on data, and the systems that collect, move, and store that data need an owner. As Backend Engineer - Data & Orchestration, you will transform a rapidly growing data platform into a reliable, unified system the entire company can depend on. Your responsibilities include:

• Data collection: Ensure our scrapers and platform integrations remain operational across unreliable sources, rate limits, anti-bot measures, and APIs that change overnight.

• Pipelines and storage: Own end-to-end event-driven pipelines, from orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, or similar) to databases and warehouses, ensuring fault tolerance and cost efficiency.

• Monitoring and reliability: Develop monitoring and alerting systems (Datadog or similar) to maintain service health, and implement checks for data freshness, volume, schema, and values to prevent errors before they impact downstream processes.

• Backend services: Work on production services and APIs that handle data flows, including JavaScript backends.

• Infrastructure and security: Manage CI/CD, infrastructure as code, cloud for data systems, and access controls, including managing AI tool access and secrets.

• Simplification: Consolidate and streamline systems that have grown rapidly, removing unnecessary components and documenting the final architecture.

• Cross-team collaboration: Explain data capabilities and limitations to non-technical colleagues and mentor junior engineers as the team scales.

Requirements

Melotech seeks an engineer who operates and builds systems that keep running. Ideal candidates have:

• Experience: 3 to 10 years of hands-on engineering, primarily in small or fast-growing companies where they owned production systems independently.

• Technical Skills: Advanced Python, including async code and long-running data jobs, with sufficient backend experience to work on production services and APIs, including basic JavaScript or TypeScript backends.

• Data Acquisition: Experience maintaining unreliable external sources in production (scrapers, platform APIs, unofficial endpoints) and handling proxies, rate limits, and anti-bot measures. Familiarity with using LLMs to extract data from messy sources is a plus.

• Pipelines and Storage: Experience designing and running event-driven, fault-tolerant pipelines handling millions of records daily, using tools like Airflow, Dagster, or task queues, on databases such as Postgres, ClickHouse, MongoDB, or Redshift. Understanding of cost management for these systems is essential.

• Data Reliability and Monitoring: Systems that proactively report issues through checks for freshness, volume, schema, and value anomalies. Experience with Datadog or similar tools to ensure service reliability.

• Infrastructure and Security: Comfortable with Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, and cloud environments. Experience with access reviews and role-based access control is a significant advantage.

• Ownership and Communication: History of owning and simplifying messy data setups in smaller companies, leaving them well-documented and maintainable. Ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and mentor junior engineers or lead small teams.

• Engineering Fundamentals: Strong foundation in building solid systems before the widespread use of AI coding tools. Use AI tools to accelerate development without compromising judgment. Emphasis on clean code, context understanding, and fast shipping.

• Pace: Thrives in fast-paced, performance-driven environments.

Why This Role Excites

Your data systems are the backbone of everything Melotech does, and you own them entirely. You are not maintaining a legacy system; instead, you decide how these systems should function and implement them accordingly. You are not just a part of the machine but the captain of your own ship, rewarded for performance and respected for leadership.

Melotech offers competitive salaries and equity to make you an owner of the business. The company operates remotely, providing complete freedom over your life while fostering global collaboration through regular offsites where strategy, bonding, and boundary-pushing occur.