Senior Backend Python Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

About Hubs

At Hubs, we’re building the next generation of AI-powered automation for knowledge work. Our team is growing, fast-moving, and ambitious — led by multi-exit silicon valley entrepreneurs with a strong track record of creating products that shape how people work and live.

We believe one of the most important challenges of the coming years is sensemaking: helping professionals cut through complexity, make better decisions (time-to-insight), and amplify their impact (time-to-action). That’s what we’re solving.

Our approach is bottom-up, focusing on front line professionals and teams. We’re not building another top-down enterprise system that gets lost in IT pilots and consultants. We’re creating tools that people love, that they actually want to use every day — tools that spread organically, because they make work clearer, faster, and more effective.

Along the way, we get to work with some of the most exciting parts of technology today — autonomous AI, innovative UIs, and reactive dataflows. It’s the kind of work where the engineering itself feels fresh and creative, with room for invention and curiosity.

Joining Hubs means working on problems that matter. You’ll be building for yourself, your peers, and millions of professionals navigating the shift from pre-AI to AI-first work. The products you create will be visible, widely used, and part of a broad societal transformation in how knowledge work gets done.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to lead and enhance the backbone of our AI automation platform. This is a hands-on role with real architectural responsibility — ideal for someone with technical leadership experience who has taken a product from early stage to scale and knows how to balance speed with long-term stability. The work centers on building an autonomous reactive programming architecture that makes AI automation feel seamless and alive, while also designing the distributed systems and scalable infrastructure needed to support widespread adoption.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and optimize backend services to support real-time AI and automation workloads.

Architect distributed systems with instrumentation that scale reliably and efficiently.

Improve system performance of streaming data, asynchronous event-driven communications, and resilient microservices.

Collaborate with frontend, product and devops teams to ensure seamless integration.

Architect for scale, performance and efficiency at the logic, network and database layers.

Lay foundations for high quality distributed services that can evolve and grow as we scale out.

We’re looking for a backend engineer who is both highly technical and pragmatic, excited to use AI tools to amplify their output and ship better products faster. You should bring:

Productization Experience : A track record of productizing software from early development through scale-out, including system scaling, security infrastructure, and monetization.

Collaboration & Ownership : Organized, responsible, and proactive — able to manage multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment, solve technical challenges independently, and coordinate across the team.

Critical Thinking & Communication : Strong problem-solving skills with clear written and spoken English for remote collaboration (Spanish and/or Portuguese are a plus).

Pragmatism : The judgment to know when to move fast and when to invest in long-term stability.

Backend & Architecture : Strong experience with Node.js and frameworks like Nest.js or Express, plus a solid grasp of distributed systems, scaling patterns, microservices, and cloud infrastructure.

APIs & Dataflows : Familiarity with streaming APIs, websockets, asynchronous architectures, and designing/maintaining RESTful APIs and event schemas.

AI familiarity: Experienced building tools and data pipelines using Python and AI APIs, with a strong understanding of when and how to apply different LLMs.

Databases : Hands-on expertise with both relational (Postgres) and document (MongoDB) databases, from schema design to indexes and query tuning, with an emphasis on scalability and performance.

Skills & Qualifications

Experience Level : 5+ years of backend development, focusing on data systems and high-traffic web applications.

Languages & Technologies : TypeScript, Node.js, Python.

Databases : PostgreSQL and MongoDB at scale.

Performance optimization: Experience using observability tools, debugging, and performing root cause analysis.

Data Pipelines : Experience building scalable asynchronous pipelines, especially for language/AI data.

DevOps & Tools : Git, CI/CD processes; familiarity with Datadog, Digital Ocean, and/or GCP is a plus.

If you’re excited about building a product with potential for tremendous impact at the leading edge of AI-first productivity and collaboration, we’d love to hear from you!

At Hubs, we’re committed to building not just transformative products, but also a place where ambitious builders can thrive. You’ll join a fast-moving, design-obsessed team where your ideas have real impact from day one. We offer a competitive salary, a chance for participation in upside via stock plans, and the flexibility of a remote-first environment. As an early member of the engineering team, you’ll help shape both our product and our culture, working alongside passionate people who care deeply about craft, autonomy, and creating experiences users love.