Staff Backend Engineer - Moderation

Who We Are

Our team is building a new product within Cloudinary, focused on large scale visual moderation.It is a fast moving, high impact effort that is already attracting interest from major customers. We operate like a small startup inside Cloudinary, which means:

• Full independence in technical and product decisions

• Freedom to build things the right way

• The backing and stability of a well established, successful company

• Strong people first culture with genuinely great teammates

We own the full development lifecycle, from deciding what to build to how we build, ship, and operate it. The team is very small, highly focused, and fully hands on.

Why This Role Is Different

• You will work on a backend system where scale, cost, and correctness all matter at the same time

• You will have real architectural ownership, direct customer impact, and the freedom to move fast without heavy process

• Few roles offer this combination inside a mature company

What You Will Do

Own the Server Side

Design, build, and evolve the server side of a moderation platform operating at scale, including:

• High throughput async pipelines

• Large volumes of images and videos

• Multi tenant systems

• Cost sensitive ML workloads

Ship Fast, Ship Smart

• Deliver value iteratively with a clear focus on customer and business impact

• Move quickly without losing sight of long term architecture and operational quality

Set the Technical Foundation

• Make architectural decisions that scale over time

• Choose tools pragmatically

• Use code generation and LLM assisted development to accelerate delivery, while keeping engineering judgment and code ownership firmly in human hands

Elevate Quality and Standards

• Build clean, modular, secure backend systems that are meant to live and evolve

• Establish good engineering practices around testing, observability, reliability, and maintainability

Drive Innovation and Practicality

• Explore new ideas and approaches, but always ground them in real world constraints like latency, cost, and operational complexity

Who We Are Looking For

Experienced Backend Engineer

• 10+ years backend experience owning and delivering production systems

• Strong hands on coding skills and confidence working deep in the backend stack

• Languages and frameworks do not slow you down. We use Python

Cloud Native

• Strong experience building and operating cloud based systems, preferably on AWS

• Hands on experience with distributed systems, async processing, queues, workflows, and production monitoring

Independent, Collaborative, and Comfortable with Ambiguity

• You thrive in low process environments and communicate clearly

• You can step into new domains, work through messy problems, and make fast progress while collaborating effectively with engineers, PMs, and stakeholders across the company

A Great Teammate

• You value clear communication, trust, humor, and helping build a strong and supportive team culture

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.