Senior Software Engineer, Backend Development (Python)

Overview

Senior Backend Engineer on Kensho's Applications group, building the backend services, APIs and orchestration layers that deliver Kensho's AI capabilities to customers.

What you'll do

• Design, develop, test and maintain backend services and APIs that power Kensho's AI applications, ensuring they are reliable, secure and performant.
• Create APIs and services that orchestrate data retrieval workflows, integrate with ML systems, and support grounded, verifiable outputs for GenAI (LLM based) applications.
• Identify and resolve latency, throughput and scalability issues across distributed systems to ensure smooth operation under high-load and real-time retrieval scenarios.
• Contribute to architectural decisions, implement clean service boundaries, and build backend foundations that support both the GenAI platform and established ML toolkits like Link and NERD.
• Implement monitoring, logging, alerting and instrumentation to ensure system health, observability and rapid issue detection.
• Apply best practices for API security, authentication, authorization and data privacy in compliance with Kensho and S&P Global standards.
• Identify technical debt, propose practical improvements, and enhance code quality, maintainability and fault tolerance across the stack.
• Work closely with Product, Machine Learning, Infrastructure and Design teams to align backend capabilities with user needs and product direction.
• Build backend components that enable smooth, intuitive and reliable user experiences in customer-facing applications.
• Validate new ideas through prototypes, instrumentation and data-driven experimentation to support innovation and rapid iteration.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of direct experience developing customer-facing APIs within a team.
• Experience developing RESTful APIs using a variety of tools.
• Experience working across many stages of the software development lifecycle.
• Sound reasoning about the behavior and performance of loosely-coupled systems.
• Proficiency with algorithms (including time and space complexity analysis), data structures and software architecture.
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and tools to streamline deployment processes.
• Experience with containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) for application deployment and orchestration.
• Strong understanding of distributed system concepts, concurrency and event-driven architectures.
• Experience building and scaling high-volume, low-latency backend services.
• Hands-on experience with messaging, task queues or workflow systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Celery, or similar.
• Experience deploying and operating backend systems on a major cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• Experience with observability tools and best practices, including metrics, tracing and structured logging.
• Thoughtful and efficient communication skills (both verbal and written).
• Experience turning abstract business requirements into concrete technical plans.

Details

• Location: Hyderabad, Telangana.
• Technology you'll encounter: Python, Flask, FastAPI, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, AWS, Docker and other orchestration tools, Sentry, Prometheus, Git, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Jsonnet, Terraform, Grafana.