Senior Backend Engineer (f/m/x)

You will work on applications that use deep learning and satellite data and other data sources to help companies and governments fight deforestation, monitor critical infrastructure, and respond faster and more precisely to natural disasters. Our aim is to empower any user in the world to harness the power of earth observation satellites to simplify and improve their daily work.
You will join the team that turns analytics outputs into data products and makes them available across the platform and to customers. We already have deep geospatial and data engineering expertise in the team; what we need is a strong generalist software engineer who makes our core services and pipelines more reliable, observable and scalable. Concrete topics you would work on are, for example, the performance and scalability of backend services serving large volumes of geospatial data, the health and observability of our end-to-end processing pipeline, and the stability of the interfaces between the services that make it up.
We are a team of five engineers and three geospatial analysts today, embedded in a cross-functional group of product managers, UX/UI designers, data, devops, ML, and geospatial engineering experts. You will not be the only person responsible for any system you touch, but you will play a crucial role in how we evolve our services and components.

• Own the maintenance, performance and scalability of core backend services, evolving their data models, APIs and storage as data volumes and consumers grow.
• Maintain a clear, shared view of the health of the end-to-end product pipeline so that regressions and failures are detected early rather than discovered late or through manual coordination.
• Build and uphold the practices that make this possible: monitoring, alerting, automated quality checks and testing across services.
• Help keep the interfaces between services stable: spot schema drift, contract failures and version incompatibilities early, feed concrete failure cases back to the owning engineers and help establish durable contracts.
• Contribute to safer release practices such as backwards compatibility, feature flags and staged rollouts.
• Maintain and improve our workflow orchestration and the automation around it, reducing manual steps and operational toil.
• Turn observed system behaviour into concrete improvement work and bring it into team planning.
• Mentor engineers through code review and pairing; raise the bar on scoping, testing and release stability.

Stack

• Backend: Python
• Orchestration: Prefect, Anyscale, K8s
• Database: PostgreSQL / PostGIS (including geospatial workloads)
• Infrastructure & CI/CD: Gitlab, AWS

Must have:

• At least 5 of experience building and operating production backend services or data pipelines in Python
• Solid track record maintaining and scaling services already in production: performance work, observability, testing, incident handling
• Strong relational database skills; comfortable with API design and service-to-service contracts
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes, including troubleshooting and incident response
• You've used AI-assisted coding in your actual day-to-day, not just tried it once

Nice to have:

• Geospatial data experience (PostGIS or similar)
• Raster processing or satellite imagery background
• Spec-driven or test-driven development, agentic or otherwise
• Experience with a workflow orchestrator (Prefect, Airflow or similar)
• Experience running workloads on AWS
• Experience working across multiple teams on shared interfaces or contracts

You do not need all of the "nice to haves," and you do not need to match every "must have" perfectly. If you read this and think you'd be a good fit but you're missing a line item, apply and tell us what you'd bring instead.
We especially encourage people from groups underrepresented in tech - including women, trans, non-binary, and intersex people - to apply. Engineering at LiveEO isn't as diverse as we want it to be, and we'd rather change that than just talk about it.

• The opportunity to create a product that can improve business processes and lives across the globe.
• Flexible working hours and hybrid work model - we trust our employees to get their work done while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
• We empower employees to drive their own career development, take initiative and have the freedom to be creative and bold.
• Not an overtime culture - we take care that overtime is done only as a necessity and always offset with time off and rest.
• A collaborative and learning environment - frequent internal workshops, knowledge sharing sessions, journal clubs and hackathons.
• Office located in the centre of Berlin Kreuzberg with free fruit, nuts and drinks.
• Potential to participate in the employee stock option program.
• Urban Sports membership and BVG subsidy, corporate pension program.
• A diverse and vibrant international environment of 30+ different nationalities.

LiveEO is a well funded startup founded in 2018 and based in Berlin. Our primary service is modelling risk to our customers’ assets and infrastructure from vegetation, ground deformation and change detection. We currently have around 160 employees from all over the world with a variety of backgrounds