AURORA
Senior Backend Engineer
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Senior Backend Engineer
London, UK | Salary: $100,000 - $150,000 | Meaningful Equity | In-person (with Flexible Remote Days Available)
About Aurora
Aurora is the Lifestyle Operating System empowering the world’s highest-performing individuals: Ultimately, consumer technology was supposed to help us—find the right restaurant, the right trip, the right doctor. Instead, today’s major platforms prioritise engagement loops and ads, over utility. Aurora flips the script.
How it works: Aurora takes millions of data points about you and about the world to find that one thing that’s right for you, at the right time.
Our members—including top-tier founders, executives, and athletes—use Aurora to make high-stakes decisions in travel, health, dining, experiences, and premium goods with confidence. Precisely like systems that once required years of team-curated intros.
Key milestones:
- 50%+ of members use Aurora daily, 95% weekly
- ** Member spend exceeds industry benchmarks by 5× in the first six months**
- Backed by Alex Macdonald, the most successful founder in the category, with $5M+ raised from tier-1 operators and investors.
Our Work Ethos
- High polish, high leverage: We build products tailored to discerning users.
- Urgent inputs, pragmatic outputs: We move fast without sacrificing quality.
- High-performance startup academy: Many team members aim to become independent founders while mastering scale-up engineering.
The Role
Aurora is located full-time in London (Belgravia office, with offices in NYC and LA). This role requires at least one week/month in London, with potential full relocation to London within six months.
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We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to partner with the CTO and world-class engineering team as Aurora realises its ambition to lehner the backend infrastructure of choice predictions.
Responsibilities
Since we are already shipping, this is a high-ownership hands-on role:
- Build core backend services & APIs using Python and Django.
- Own features end-to-end, from design to production rollout.
- Maintain and scale background processing, agent orchestration, and LLM integrations.
- Structure industrial-scale context-heavy pipelines (think RAG-style systems).
- Enable GCP infrastructure as scalable foundations get beefed up.
- Drive observability & performance across SQL, background jobs, and API latency.
- Debug production issues, lead incident response.
- Implement security & compliance rigor (via$
- Collaborate closely with product, curators, and frontend/mobile engineers.
- Lift the code standard via technical reviews, pair programming, documentation.
Besides these mechanisms push further toward autonomy & leadership when Aurora is ready to grow.
Requirements
Technical Expertise
Critical:
- 5+ years shipping and operating production-grade backend systems.
- Proven mastery of Python & Django—including REST APIs (if applicable).
- Deep Django framework fluency (e.g., ORM gotchas, edge cases, common pitfalls).
- SQL expertise: schema design, indexing, performance tuning.
- Background job skill; hands-on with Celery.
- Reliability-heavy mindset: designing observable, resilient, easy-to-maintain systems.
- LLM/AI & agent system exposure (e.g., building prompt pipelines, orchestrating inference).
- RAG or data connectivity patterns experience is a comma.
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Nice to have:
- Black belt at Chromeless or Playwright clone workflows.
- Insights into security frameworks (SOC2, PCI DSS, ISO 270) or infrastructure compliance.
- Foundations in machine inference systems on GPU (e.g., Vertex AI, anthropic Bedrock).
Production Operators
Serious Hauker expectations: not just "I Like Drift."
- Gave and repeatedly refurbished cloud native ecosystems: GCP-first infrastructure-as-code (ideally via Terraform).
- Microsoft Active Directory & Version Control two-pack awareness.
- Triage-major outages as first workflow allegiance.
Product要求 & Mindset
BReakthroughs delight if you embrace these nodes:
- You care about usage outcomes, not just checklists.
- Latency & failure modes are top of strikers.
- Clarify trades-offs (sacrificing one compute for shortcuts; costs).
Collaboration
Anybody who ships effectively:
- Builds rapport with product, designers, histologists and VFR engineers.
- Clear words & swift execution.
- Love proximity: aim to be near the build-product conversation.
Why Join Aurora?
Bonus Bucks
- $2,000 annual Tech & Education Budget 💻
- Complimentary Oura Ring or Whoop 🔬
- Lifespan insights subscription: Self-driven longevity pulse check. 🧬
- Notion lifestyle perks (marketed under the impression: “DnR everyone receives an extra dish access.”
Security Net
- Premium wellness benefits (90% coverage | global private health tour packages, lifetime dental & vision) → but try to compete with EY global nappy service!
Join us. 🚀 [Apply Now]
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