Staff Backend Engineer - Moderation

About the job

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 way we want

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

Agentic moderation workflows and AI-driven decision systems

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.

Use agentic development and code generation to accelerate delivery, while keeping engineering judgment, technical accountability, 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 and take ownership of outcomes, not just implementation.

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.