Backend Engineer (Python)

We are looking for an Intermediate Backend Engineer (Python) to join our team and contribute to the development of MDPI Pulse, an important initiative shaping how MDPI engages with the academic community. As a Backend Engineer, you will have the opportunity to design technical solutions, build reliable services and data flows, and contribute to how those solutions are deployed and operated in production. You will work closely with the Data Engineer assigned to the project, as well as the Belgrade email-marketing operations team and other teams such as Product, QA, UX and DevOps.

Core Responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain scalable backend services and APIs using Python.
• Contribute to software architecture and technical design decisions, translating product requirements into reliable backend solutions.
• Design and maintain data pipelines that support Pulse’s targeting and communication capabilities, from ingestion and transformation through to storage and consumption.
• Work with data from a variety of sources and storage technologies - relational databases, vector databases, object storage and analytical tooling, and collaborate closely with Data Engineers.
• Contribute to the reliability, scalability and maintainability of data-processing workflows.
• Deploy, containerize and operate backend services in production, taking ownership of the full path to production through Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.

Additional Responsibilities

• Write integration tests and maintain comprehensive test coverage for owned components.
• Perform code reviews, providing constructive feedback to improve team code quality.
• Apply observability principles to owned services, contributing to service health monitoring and alerting.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.
• Around 5 years of professional experience in backend or software engineering, with strong hands-on experience using Python.
• Solid experience with backend architecture and software design, including designing and implementing reliable, maintainable services and REST APIs.
• Strong knowledge of databases and SQL, with hands-on experience across relational engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB, including ORM frameworks, database migrations and query optimization.
• Experience with vector databases, such as Qdrant, is a strong advantage.
• Practical experience designing and operating data pipelines, including columnar file formats (Parquet) and object storage (S3), as well as analytics and transformation tooling such as DuckDB and dbt.
• Solid DevOps notions and proven experience taking software to production, including Git, Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical solutions and collaborate effectively with engineering and cross-functional teams.