About the Team
We're building a new product within Cloudinary focused on large-scale visual moderation.
This is a fast-moving, high-impact initiative that is already gaining traction with enterprise customers. The team operates like a startup within Cloudinary - small, highly collaborative, and empowered to make decisions quickly while benefiting from the stability and resources of a successful global company.
We own the entire product lifecycle, from defining technical direction and architecture to building, shipping, and operating the platform in production.
About the RoleWe're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to play a key technical leadership role in designing and building the backend architecture of our next-generation moderation platform.
This is a hands-on engineering role with significant ownership. You'll help shape the technical direction of the product, make architectural decisions that will scale over time, and work on systems where performance, scalability, reliability, and cost all matter simultaneously.
If you enjoy solving complex engineering challenges, working with modern cloud technologies, and building products from the ground up, we'd love to meet you.
What You'll Do
Design, build, and evolve the backend architecture of a large-scale visual moderation platform
Develop high-throughput asynchronous processing pipelines for images and videos
Design scalable multi-tenant services that support enterprise customers
Build efficient systems supporting ML-powered workloads while optimizing for performance and cost
Take end-to-end ownership of backend services, from architecture and implementation through deployment and production operations
Make architectural decisions that balance scalability, reliability, maintainability, and delivery speed
Continuously improve engineering quality through testing, observability, monitoring, and operational excellence
Evaluate and adopt new technologies where they create real business value
Leverage modern development tools, including AI-assisted development, while maintaining strong engineering standards and code quality
Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver customer-focused solutions
Help establish engineering best practices and raise the technical bar across the team
What We're Looking For
10+ years of backend software engineering experience building and operating production systems
Proven experience designing scalable, distributed backend architectures
Strong hands-on software development skills with deep backend expertise (Python preferred)
Extensive experience building cloud-native applications, preferably on AWS
Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, messaging systems, workflows, and production monitoring
Experience designing highly scalable, high-availability services
Excellent architectural thinking with the ability to balance long-term design and short-term delivery
Comfortable working in fast-moving, low-process environments with a high degree of ownership
Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, and business teams
Curiosity, pragmatism, and a passion for building high-quality software
Why Join Us?
Build a brand-new product with significant technical ownership and influence
Work on challenging large-scale distributed systems and ML-powered workloads
Join a small, experienced team where your ideas directly shape the product
Enjoy the speed and autonomy of a startup backed by the stability of a successful global SaaS company
Help define the engineering culture, architecture, and technical direction from day one
Skills Required
- 10+ years backend experience owning and delivering production systems
- Strong hands-on coding skills and deep backend development experience (Python)
- Experience building and operating cloud-based systems
- Experience with AWS
- Hands-on experience with distributed systems, async processing, queues, and workflows
- Experience with production monitoring and observability
- Experience designing high-throughput async pipelines handling large volumes of images and videos
- Experience building multi-tenant systems and cost-sensitive ML workloads
- Ability to work independently in low-process environments and communicate clearly with stakeholders
- Familiarity with code generation and LLM-assisted development
What We Do
Cloudinary’s mission is to empower companies to deliver visual experiences that inspire and connect by unleashing the full potential of their media. With more than 50 billion assets under management and 7,500 customers worldwide, Cloudinary is the industry standard for developers, creators and marketers looking to upload, store, transform, manage, and deliver images and videos online. As a result, leading brands like Atlassian, Bleacher Report, Grubhub, Hinge, NBC, Mediavine, Peloton, Petco and Under Armour are seeing significant business value in using Cloudinary, including faster time to market, higher user satisfaction, and increased engagement and conversions. For more information, visit www.cloudinary.com.
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