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Principal Backend Engineer

  • On-site
    • Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

Job description

Location Zurich, Switzerland

About the Team At Albatross, we are on a mission to revolutionize user engagement. Through advanced AI-driven personalization, we generate inspiring user experiences that increase conversions and loyalty. Our founders are recognized scientists and business leaders with a proven track record of delivering personalization solutions at Amazon and other leading tech companies. We are at an exciting stage: we are backed by top-tier investors Redalpine and Daphni, already serving tens of millions of predictions and delivering significant uplifts in conversion. We obsess over our customers and value excellence, ownership, speed, and above all, delivering results.

About the Role: We are seeking a Principal Backend Engineer / Technical Lead to architect and lead the development of our high-performance, low-latency AI personalization infrastructure. This is a senior technical leadership role for an experienced engineer who has built and scaled mission-critical systems from the ground up. You will be responsible for designing event-driven architectures that handle millions of real-time personalization requests with sub-millisecond latency requirements.

As a technical leader, you will drive architectural decisions, and work closely with our data science teams to productionize machine learning models at scale. Your expertise in building robust, high-performance systems will be crucial as we continue to scale our platform across diverse industries.

Key Responsibilities:

  • System Architecture & Leadership: Design and architect high-performance, event-driven backend systems capable of handling millions of concurrent requests with ultra-low latency

  • Rust Engineering: Build and maintain performance-critical services in Rust, optimizing for memory efficiency and concurrent processing

  • Event-Driven Architecture: Design and implement scalable event-driven systems using modern messaging platforms (NATS, Apache Pulsar, or similar)

  • Performance Optimization: Continuously profile, benchmark, and optimize system performance to maintain sub-millisecond response times

  • Production ML Integration: Collaborate with data science teams to deploy and serve machine learning models in high-throughput production environments

  • Infrastructure Scaling: Design systems that can seamlessly scale from thousands to millions of requests per second

  • Strategic Technical Planning: Contribute to long-term technical strategy and roadmap planning, balancing performance, scalability, and business requirements

Required Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of backend engineering experience with significant time spent as a Lead Engineer, Principal Engineer, or CTO in technology companies

  • Expert-level proficiency in Rust with demonstrated experience building and maintaining low-latency, high-throughput systems

  • Deep expertise in event-driven architectures and asynchronous programming patterns

  • Hands-on experience with high-performance messaging systems such as NATS, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redis Streams

  • Proven track record of architecting and scaling systems that handle millions of requests per day

  • Strong experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) including Kubernetes orchestration, containerization (Docker), and observability tools

  • Database expertise across both SQL and NoSQL systems, with experience in performance tuning and optimization

  • Business acumen with ability to translate complex technical concepts to stakeholders and align engineering decisions with business objectives

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with real-time ML inference and model serving frameworks

  • Knowledge of distributed systems patterns and microservices architecture

  • Experience with observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing)

  • Background in high-frequency trading, ad-tech, or real-time personalization systems

  • Contributions to open-source projects in the Rust ecosystem

  • Experience with WebAssembly (WASM) for edge computing applications

Why Join Albatross:

  • Technical Leadership Opportunity: Shape the technical direction of a cutting-edge AI platform with significant architectural influence

  • Performance Engineering Challenges: Work on genuinely challenging problems requiring microsecond-level optimizations

  • Fast-Growing Startup: Be a key technical leader in a well-funded company with proven market traction

  • Competitive Compensation: Senior-level compensation package including equity participation

  • Zurich Base: Work from our Zurich office with access to Europe's thriving tech ecosystem

  • Flexible Work Environment: Hybrid work model with remote options across Europe

  • Direct Impact: Your technical decisions will directly influence millions of user interactions daily

Application Process: Please include in your application:

  • Examples of high-performance systems you've architected and scaled

  • Your experience with Rust in production environments

  • Leadership experience and team-building philosophy

  • Any relevant open-source contributions or technical writing

If you're a seasoned engineering leader excited about pushing the boundaries of real-time AI systems, we'd love to discuss this opportunity with you.

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