Backend Engineer

About PolarGrid

PolarGrid is an early-stage Canadian AI infrastructure company building a distributed inference network. We run LLM and voice inference workloads on GPU nodes at the edge, with supporting backend services hosted on AWS.

Our goal is to make AI inference fast, reliable, and secure for customers running production workloads.

The Role

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to help build, operate, and scale the infrastructure behind PolarGrid's inference network.

You'll work across cloud backend services, Kubernetes infrastructure, reliability, and security. This is a hands-on engineering role where you'll be responsible not just for building systems, but also for running and supporting them in production.

You'll work closely with a small engineering team and take ownership of technical decisions, implementation, and operational reliability.

What You'll Do

Cloud Backend Engineering

• Build and maintain backend services in Go and Python on AWS.

• Develop and operate services using AWS Lambda, CloudFront, and AWS CDK.

• Work with Supabase PostgreSQL to support application data, APIs, and access controls.

• Design and maintain reliable, secure backend integrations.

GPU and Edge Infrastructure

• Help deploy and operate Kubernetes workloads across bare-metal GPU nodes.

• Build and improve deployment automation for GPU infrastructure.

• Support provisioning, configuration, and production readiness of edge nodes.

• Troubleshoot infrastructure and deployment issues across cloud and edge environments.

Reliability and Operations

• Build and maintain health checks, monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling.

• Define and track service-level objectives (SLOs).

• Improve availability, routing, recovery, and failure handling.

• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and postmortems.

• Identify recurring operational problems and automate solutions.

Security

• Implement and maintain authentication, authorization, and credential management.

• Work with AWS IAM, PostgreSQL row-level security (RLS), and privacy-related controls.

• Review security-sensitive pull requests and help maintain secure development practices.

• Identify and address security risks across cloud services and infrastructure.

What We're Looking For

Required

• Hands-on experience building and operating production systems using AWS and Kubernetes, including production support or on-call responsibilities.

• Strong software engineering experience in Go and/or Python.

• Experience developing backend services, APIs, and distributed systems.

• Experience using infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CDK or Terraform.

• Experience with production monitoring, alerting, incident response, and reliability practices.

• Understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, and cloud infrastructure security.

• Ability to work independently and take ownership of systems from development through production.

Relevant Experience

We don't expect every candidate to have worked extensively across all areas. Strong experience in at least two of the following is valuable:

• AWS backend services and cloud architecture.

• Kubernetes, bare-metal servers, and GPU infrastructure.

• Production reliability, monitoring, SLOs, and incident management.

• Security engineering, API authorization, IAM, and PostgreSQL RLS.

How We Work

PolarGrid is a small engineering team, so you'll have meaningful ownership and direct involvement in technical decisions.

We're looking for someone who enjoys solving difficult infrastructure problems, can move between software development and operations, and takes responsibility for keeping production systems running reliably.

You should be comfortable with:

• Working remotely within Canada, with overlap during North American working hours.

• Participating in an on-call rotation.

• Reviewing security-sensitive code.

• Completing a background check as part of the hiring process.

Compensation

Competitive base salary in CAD, based on experience and technical depth.