Archived listing. The details below describe a past opening.
Senior Backend Engineer (IoT and Wearables)
About Us
Sapir AI is a Toronto-based robotics and AI startup building connected consumer hardware, including wearables and smart home devices. We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own the systems behind our connected devices, from data pipelines to AI infrastructure. You'll work with high autonomy, taking full ownership from design to production.
Responsibilities
- Backend systems handling real-time device data (video, sensor, and AI inference events) at scale
- Edge-to-cloud AI pipelines and third-party machine learning inference integrations
- Privacy-first storage and retention, with on-device processing where possible
- Event-streaming, alerting, and subscription billing infrastructure
Requirements
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience; Python required
- SQL and NoSQL databases (Postgres, DynamoDB/MongoDB)
- AWS/GCP and streaming infrastructure (IoT Core/Kinesis), Firebase (storage, messaging)
- API design at scale: REST/gRPC, plus MQTT and/or Kafka
- Vector database systems
- NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal techniques (STUN, TURN, ICE)
- Video/audio/binary data pipelines
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment), Docker/Kubernetes, staging/deployment/scaling tooling
Nice to Have
- Production machine learning/large language model inference infrastructure (managed model APIs, vLLM, Triton, or similar)
- Async/event-driven systems (queues, workers, retries, idempotency)
- Consumer IoT (Internet of Things)/wearables experience, or any machine learning application with real production traffic
- On-device/edge machine learning or privacy-preserving architecture experience
Soft Skills
- Adaptable and comfortable with fast iteration as the product evolves
- Pragmatic about scale. Builds for today, while understanding where to maintain flexibility to future-proof for growth
- Collaborative across hardware, firmware, and mobile teams
