Lead Backend Software Engineer, Digital Assembly Line

Posted 6 months ago San Francisco, CA full-time

Design and build the backend API stack for Avala's ML Ops platform — the Digital Assembly Line that orchestrates annotation workflows, manages petabytes of sensor data, and powers enterprise integrations. You'll set the technical direction for our Python/Django backend.

• Design and build RESTful APIs using Django REST Framework for dataset management, annotation workflows, and export pipelines
• Architect large-scale data processing pipelines with Celery for LiDAR, camera, and radar data
• Implement monitoring, deployment, and observability systems
• Lead architecture decisions that power the Digital Assembly Line product
• Optimize PostgreSQL queries and schema design for datasets with millions of items
• Mentor junior engineers and establish backend engineering best practices

• 5+ years building production backend systems in Python (Django strongly preferred)
• Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration experience
• Strong SQL and database design knowledge
• CI/CD pipeline experience (Buildkite, Git Hub Actions, or similar)
• Experience with distributed task queues (Celery) at scale

• Experience with AWS services (ECS, Aurora, S3, SQS) in production
• Familiarity with ML data pipelines or annotation systems
• Experience building developer tools or APIs

Competitive salary and meaningful equity in the team building Fleet Learning Infrastructure for Physical AI

Full health, dental, and vision coverage, plus FSA and unlimited PTO

Work on the closed-loop data infrastructure that the next generation of autonomous systems learns from

A team that built Tesla Autopilot's data infrastructure, now building something bigger