Senior Backend Engineer

Karya is building the data infrastructure for the next generation of AI. We work across languages and real-world contexts to create high-quality datasets and evaluations, while creating meaningful digital work for underserved communities.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to take ownership of important parts of our platform and help shape the next generation of Karya’s engineering infrastructure.

This is a role for someone who enjoys being given a difficult problem and figuring out how to solve it. You’ll work closely with the Head of Engineering and have significant autonomy over the systems you own, from architecture and implementation through production and iteration. 

What You'll Do 

Much of the infrastructure we build has constraints that are uncommon in conventional software systems.

Karya operates across multiple geographies, with different requirements, environments, and network conditions. Our systems need to work reliably even when connectivity is limited or intermittent, while still supporting a centralized platform that can scale across countries without becoming a collection of country-specific systems.

You’ll work on problems such as:

• Building backend infrastructure that can operate reliably across very different environments and geographies.
• Designing systems that cannot always assume a reliable network, including resilient data transfer and eventual synchronization.
• Evolving our existing architecture as the platform grows, making the right trade-offs between simplicity, performance, reliability, and scale.
• Building infrastructure and developer tooling that increases the leverage of the engineering team.
• Solving problems across APIs, data systems, distributed systems, integrations, performance, security, and reliability.

The interesting part is that there often isn't an established pattern to follow. You’ll need to understand the constraints, make good technical decisions, and build pragmatic solutions.

What You'll own

You’ll own meaningful product and technical areas end-to-end.

That means understanding the problem, shaping the solution, making architectural decisions, writing the code, getting it into production, and being responsible for what happens afterwards.

Over time, we expect you to take ownership of a significant product area or technical domain and materially improve it.

You’ll also have the opportunity to influence how the engineering team works: improving our internal infrastructure, tooling, and engineering practices so that the team can move faster while maintaining a high bar for quality.

You’ll work closely with product and engineering, contribute to technical direction, challenge requirements when appropriate, and help other engineers make better technical decisions.

What We are looking for

We’re looking for someone with roughly 5 years of software engineering experience. The number matters less than the depth of your experience and the ownership you've demonstrated.

You should have:

• 3-5 years of experience with backend engineering fundamentals
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and strong proficiency in Node.js.
• Good understanding of databases, including schema design, query optimization, and performance.
• A solid understanding of reliability, testing, security, and production engineering.
• Basic to intermediate understanding of distributed systems and scalability.
• The ability to understand an unfamiliar or complex codebase and make meaningful changes to it.
• Strong judgment when making technical trade-offs under ambiguity.
• The ability to move quickly without creating unnecessary operational or technical debt.
• The confidence to challenge requirements constructively and propose better solutions.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• A genuine curiosity about how systems work and a willingness to learn whatever is needed to solve the problem.

Experience with unreliable networks, distributed workloads, infrastructure, developer tooling, or multi-geography systems is useful, but not required.

This role is for you if:

• You like being given a problem rather than a detailed implementation plan.
• You enjoy understanding systems deeply enough to change their architecture.
• You like owning something from an ambiguous idea all the way to production.
• You care about making other engineers more effective.
• You enjoy working through constraints that don't have obvious off-the-shelf solutions.
• You want your engineering work to have a meaningful real-world impact.

Why Karya?

You’ll be joining a small, senior engineering team with a high degree of autonomy and a direct connection to product and engineering decisions.

The engineering challenges are unusual: building infrastructure that works across radically different environments, designing software that cannot always assume reliable connectivity, and creating systems that can scale across geographies without fragmenting into separate implementations.

At the same time, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the architecture and engineering practices around you, rather than simply working within an established system.

We care about speed and quality together. We want to move quickly, make pragmatic decisions, and maintain the reliability and engineering quality needed for systems that matter.

Most importantly, the systems you build will support Karya’s mission of creating better data infrastructure for AI while creating meaningful economic opportunities for people who have historically had limited access to digital work.

If you're looking for a backend role where the interesting problems are as much about the constraints of the real world as they are about the technology, this is that kind of role.

People matter at Karya and these are some of the perks and benefits we created for our team:
• Flexible vacation and leave policy
• Flexible work options
• Insurance as per industry standards
• Access to industry stalwarts and networking opportunities

Karya is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.

Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to their race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.