<h3>Senior Backend Engineer / Architect</h3><h3><a href="https://himalayas.app/companies/imagineart">ImagineArt</a> · Remote · Full-Time</h3><h3>About the role</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em">We're a bootstrapped GenAI platform serving image and video generation at real scale — Fortune 500 clients, $35M+ ARR, and traffic that doesn't wait for you to catch up. We need a backend engineer who thinks in systems, not just services. You'll own the architecture behind our generation pipelines, inference orchestration, and the infrastructure that keeps latency low while volume climbs.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">This is a hands-on architect role. You will design and write code, not just draw diagrams.</p><h3>What you'll do</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Design and own backend systems that handle high-throughput, asynchronous workloads (generation queues, worker orchestration, media processing)</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Architect for scale and reliability — you'll make the calls on data flow, service boundaries, and failure handling</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Build and optimize async pipelines: job queuing, retries, backpressure, dead-letter handling, and everything that keeps millions of requests moving</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Improve performance and cost at the infrastructure level — inference is expensive, and efficiency is a product feature here</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Set technical direction and raise the engineering bar for the team through review and mentorship</p></li></ul><h3>What we're looking for</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong backend experience (5+ years) with real ownership of production systems at scale</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Proven system design skills — you can defend your architecture decisions with tradeoffs, not buzzwords</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hands-on experience with asynchronous pipelines, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar), and distributed workers</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Comfort with high-concurrency, high-throughput environments</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Ability to work independently in a fast, low-process, bootstrapped environment</p></li></ul><h3>Nice to have</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience with Go (or willingness to work in it — we lean on Go for backend)</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, GPU workloads, or media processing pipelines</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Track record contributing to open source (we look at GitHub signal)</p></li></ul><h3>Why <a href="https://himalayas.app/companies/imagineart">ImagineArt</a></h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Real revenue, real users, no VC treadmill — decisions are made by engineers and founders, fast</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Genuinely ha