Senior Software Engineer (Backend & Infrastructure)

About the Company

Forager is a leading provider of person and organization data, powering enrichment, search, and discovery for B2B platforms worldwide. Our APIs and bulk data feeds deliver billions of data points daily - used by the most widely used go-to-market and sales-intelligence platforms.

Our data is refreshed on an industry-leading ~2.5-week cycle: 200M+ verified mobile numbers at a 99% accuracy rate, 850M+ person and company records, and 100M+ intent signals ingested every month.

We're a small, remote team, shipping fast with high autonomy and little-to-no bureaucracy.

The Role

You'll own the backend, data, and infrastructure that deliver Forager's data to platform customers at scale - from ingestion all the way through to the APIs and feeds customers integrate against. This is a backend-first role: most of your time is spent building API features, operating our search and ETL data infrastructure, and owning the DevOps and platform layer underneath it. You'll also contribute to our customer-facing React/TypeScript web app, but that's the minority of the work.

This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You won't just contribute features - you'll be responsible for the design, reliability, and evolution of the platform itself. You'll have direct input into product direction and the freedom (and responsibility) to ship work that materially moves our coverage, accuracy, latency, and uptime metrics. You'll grow into full ownership of the platform over time, taking areas over from our CTO as you ramp up - you won't be thrown in the deep end on day one.

What You'll Own

Ranked by where your time goes:

Backend & API development - real-time enrichment APIs (person/org lookup, contact data, reverse search), search and filter endpoints, waterfall enrichment logic, and the credit/billing surfaces customers meter against. Match rate, latency, and freshness directly drive customer value.

• Design, build, and operate RESTful APIs and scalable backend services - workers, task queues, waterfall lookups, data pipelines - that keep refresh cycles predictable and fill rates high.
• Build the metering, credit-logging, and billing logic customers rely on for accurate consumption, and help shape which features have the highest impact.

Data engineering, ETL & search infrastructure - own the Elasticsearch/ECK stack end-to-end: index and mapping design, ingestion, relevance tuning, cluster health, scaling, and migrations.

• Design and operate the ETL applications that move billions of data points daily into searchable stores, Snowflake data products, and warehouse exports (S3) while holding fill rates and accuracy.
• Optimize PostgreSQL (query performance, indexing, caching) and drive measurable improvements in latency, uptime, error rate, fill rate, and scalability.

DevOps & platform (core owner) - own day-to-day AWS infrastructure (ECS, S3), infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD. This is not shared-on-the-side ops: you're responsible for infrastructure modernization, deployment pipelines, security scanning, and log/metric consolidation.

• Own observability - Grafana, CloudWatch, Sentry - and on-call response for the surfaces you build.
• Drive infrastructure modernization

Observability & data-quality tooling - build Grafana dashboards, load tests, and data-accuracy evals that make coverage, freshness, latency, and correctness measurable and continuously monitored.

Customer-facing web app (minority) - contribute to the React/TypeScript app, docs, onboarding, and self-serve surfaces when the work calls for it.

Quality & collaboration (across all of the above) - code review with high standards for readability, security, and performance; unit, integration, and E2E tests treated as a quality contributor, not overhead; and clear docs for features, architecture, and API contracts, since great developer docs are how our customers succeed.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

Required Experience

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems and APIs, with clear examples of strategic technical problem-solving (not just tenure).
• Strong proficiency in Python, ideally with Django REST Framework.
• Hands-on experience operating Elasticsearch / OpenSearch at scale - index/mapping design, query and relevance tuning, cluster management, migrations.
• Demonstrated track record building and operating ETL pipelines that move significant data volumes reliably.
• Production experience with a relational database, caching, and async task/queue systems (PostgreSQL, Redis, and Celery / RabbitMQ or equivalents preferred).
• Core-owner-level comfort with AWS (ECS, S3, CloudWatch), infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD (GitHub Actions or equivalent) - you're comfortable owning the platform, not just deploying to it.
• Experience operating services in production - observability, on-call, incident response (on-call here is light, not nightly firefighting)
• Working proficiency in a modern JavaScript framework - comfortable shipping product UI when the work calls for it (React / TypeScript preferred). This is the minority of the role, not its center.
• Strong written communication; comfortable owning documentation as a deliverable.

AI-augmented Engineering (Required)

AI coding tools are core to how we build, and you'll be expected to work effectively in an AI-augmented environment from day one. This isn't a nice-to-have - it's how the team ships. We're looking for strong, hands-on fluency with:

• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalent) for implementation, refactoring, and code review - and the discipline to validate everything they produce before it reaches production.
• Driving the tools to a good result, not just a fast one - steering an agent toward an efficient, correct solution, measuring and comparing outcomes rather than accepting the first output, and reviewing generated code for quality you'd put your name on.
• Judgment about where AI helps vs. hurts - knowing when to delegate to the tool, when to write it yourself, and how to keep it on rails for production work.

We test this directly with a hands-on exercise, so what matters is real working fluency, not buzzwords - e.g., you regularly use these tools to solve non-trivial engineering problems and can show how you got to a good solution.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Snowflake or other data warehouses.
• Background in B2B data products - enrichment, contact data, company data, search/discovery.
• Experience with web crawling, data sourcing, or large-scale ingestion systems.
• Open-source contributions or public technical writing.

Benefits

Working Arrangement

This is a full-time, fully remote, contract role (B2B / independent contractor). We're currently hiring across Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina, but we're open to strong candidates based elsewhere - reach out even if your country isn't listed.

The one fixed expectation: roughly 4 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time. Beyond that, we care about output and overlap, not clock-watching.

Benefits

• Flexible working hours - set your own schedule around that overlap window.
• Untracked PTO - take the time off you need; there's no accrual to count.
• Relaxed working environment - small team, high autonomy, low bureaucracy. Anyone can take an idea to production without jumping through hoops.