BackendEngineer

Here at The Exploration Company, we are developing, producing, and operating Nyx, a modular and reusable space orbital vehicle that can eventually be refuelled in orbit and that can carry cargo - and potentially humans in the longer run. Join us as a Backend Engineer, where you will contribute to developing a robust and scalable internal platform. You will primarily work on our data management platform for our engineering teams. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES In your capacity as a Backend Engineer – Data Management Platform you will: - Maintain and evolve a production FastAPI backend serving REST APIs for authentication, authorization, file processing, search, and AI-assisted workflows - Contribute to our real-time collaborative editing service built on Hocuspocus, Y.js, and Node.js - Design and ship database migrations using SQLAlchemy and Alembic against production MySQL databases - Build and improve AI-assisted features using LangChain and our document embedding pipelines - Ensure reliability through automated testing with pytest and operational validation - Collaborate with frontend engineers and operations teams to understand and meet their needs WHAT WE WOULD LOVE TO SEE FROM YOU The ideal candidate will have: - Proficiency in Python and experience building REST APIs with FastAPI or a comparable framework - Familiarity with relational databases (MySQL or PostgreSQL) and ORMs such as SQLAlchemy - Familiarity with caching and pub/sub systems (Redis) - Comfort reading and writing Node.js/JavaScript for backend services - Experience with AWS services (S3, IAM) and containerised deployments with Docker - Experience with version control systems such as Git - Familiarity with automated testing frameworks (pytest or equivalent) - Understanding of software design patterns and engineering best practices - Experience working in agile software development environments - Strong analytical thinking and attention to detail with the ability to balance quality and delivery speed - Motiv