Principal Backend Engineer (Architect Track) - Remote

Novakid is an online English platform for kids — 100,000+ students, 2,500+ teachers, 15+ countries. Live classes run around the clock across time zones, which sets the technical bar: low latency, high availability, and a backend that holds up at real scale.

We’ve built a working platform. The next chapter is making deliberate architectural choices about how it should evolve.

The role

We’re hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to take ownership of backend architecture as a hands-on technical leader. No direct reports. About half your time is in the code — reference implementations, critical components, refactors.

The other half is the harder work

deciding what to build, what to buy, what to defer, and why.

Our backend today is a Python core (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Celery, Postgres, Redis), surrounded by services and event-driven flows, with a growing AI layer. It runs primarily on AWS, with GCP for data and AI workloads.

There are real architectural questions to answer

how to evolve the monolith, how to set service boundaries, how to design for geo-distribution as we grow, and how to integrate AI without accumulating debt. We’re looking for someone who treats those questions seriously — researches before deciding, thinks in tradeoffs, writes things down.

What you’ll work on

• Backend architecture standards and major technical decisions across teams
• The path from monolith toward a more modular, service-oriented backend
• Service blueprints: API conventions, EDA patterns, testing, observability, deployment
• Cloud architecture across AWS (primary) and GCP, including multi-region and geo-distributed designs
• High-load, real-time systems: live class infrastructure, latency budgets, caching, capacity
• Buy vs. build vs. assemble — knowing when a managed service, a no-code tool (Retool, n8n), or an agentic-coding POC (Claude Code, Cursor) is the right call, and when it isn’t
• Production code: components, refactors, POCs, and selected product-critical features

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years of backend engineering, deeply hands-on in Python
• Production experience with FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Celery, Postgres, Redis
• Strong AWS architecture experience (EKS, Lambda, RDS, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, and so on); working knowledge of GCP a plus
• Experience designing high-load, latency-sensitive, and geo-distributed systems
• Pragmatic judgment on buy vs. build vs. assemble — managed services, no-code, and agentic tooling as first-class options, not shortcuts
• A deliberate working style: you research, weigh tradeoffs, document decisions, and explain them clearly to engineers and non-engineers alike

Nice to have

• LLM integrations in production (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI) — evaluation, cost, reliability
• Active use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor) as part of how you ship
• EdTech or other high-scale consumer platforms

Stack

Python

• FastAPI
• SQLAlchemy
• Celery
• Postgres
• Redis
• Kubernetes (EKS, GKE)
• AWS
• GCP
• SQS/SNS/EventBridge
• Pub/Sub
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Google AI

What we offer…

• Fully remote work (core hours GMT+3).
• A chance to shape the future of AI-driven education.
• A fun, dynamic team that loves building innovative products.Unlimited holidays – because we trust you to deliver.
• Bonuses and stock options – we grow together.