Backend Engineer

Role Mission

Engineers at Orchestra are not just building endpoints, you will own the orchestration engine end-to-end, and you're expected to write code wherever it is needed to ensure the feature reaches production quickly.

You will be working alongside the best engineers in the world to solve real problems on a day-to-day basis. You will ship systems that go directly into Orchestra, the control plane data and platform teams at companies like Octopus Energy and Experian run in production.

This is a role for engineers who want to work alongside the best people they've ever worked with, who can move fast in production, and who want to own the problem most people don't think about until it breaks: making sure the thing underneath never does.

What You'll Accomplish

• Own the orchestration engine: scheduling, execution, state, retries, concurrency and cancellation, the machinery that decides what runs, when, and what happens when it doesn't. Python and FastAPI on AWS, shipped to production multiple times a day
• Design for load that isn't smooth: capacity, back-pressure and isolation for a system whose busiest minute looks nothing like its average one
• Build the AI-native layer: agents are where our hardest and least-solved problems are right now, and where a lot of the next year of the product gets built
• Own your infrastructure: there's no separate platform team to hand things to. You'll write the terraform, watch what you ship, and fix it when it's wrong
• Ship end-to-end: you'll drive features from idea through to production, not hand off design or QA to someone else
• Work directly with customers: you'll sit close to the people running real workloads on the platform, debugging the genuinely interesting failures with them rather than reading a ticket
• Influence product direction: your read on what's fragile, what's missing, and what customers actually need will shape what we build next
• Help shape how we build: as a small engineering team, you'll have a real say in our culture, our standards, and how we work, not just the code you ship

Exceptional Candidates Have Demonstrated

• Real depth in Python: you've run production services in it, not just scripts. You've hit its edges, made real architecture calls, and know why certain patterns exist rather than just following them
• Judgment about distributed systems: retries, idempotency, at-least-once delivery, state machines, queues, race conditions that only show up under load. You've debugged the sort of failure that only happens in production, and you design for it now
• Comfort owning infrastructure: you've worked in a cloud environment and you treat infrastructure as part of the job rather than someone else's. Experience with IaC and serverless architectures is a real advantage
• Data modelling instinct: you can explain why a piece of state belongs in Postgres rather than DynamoDB, and you've been on the wrong side of that call at least once
• A bias to shipping: you know the difference between a fix that takes five minutes and a problem worth pausing on, and you don't gold-plate the former chasing an elegant solution nobody asked for
• A hunger to keep growing: backend is where you're strongest today, not where you plan to stay forever. We're generalists, and the interesting problems don't respect the boundary
• A commercial instinct: you understand that what you ship affects real customers, and you've built relationships with the people who use your work, not just shipped into a void