Senior Backend Engineer (Python / FastAPI)
About the Opportunity
This position entails being the main accountability point for a medical imaging backend system. Responsibilities include ensuring the correctness of the backend, overseeing its production performance, and documenting all technical decisions. It involves managing clinical data, optimizing workflow processes, and ensuring the accuracy of information in generated reports. The role also encompasses troubleshooting issues that arise under load and maintaining the operational effectiveness of existing services until they are completely replaced. The focus is on the backend system that supports machine learning models developed by a separate data science team.
Key Responsibilities
- Fully own and manage the Python/FastAPI backend system, including HTTP APIs, background processes, and production performance.
- Oversee the PostgreSQL data model and its progression, covering aspects like schema design, migrations, concurrency management, and query optimization.
- Develop event-driven pipelines for medical image processing, from data ingestion and de-identification to inference submission and result handling, ensuring reliable retry and timeout mechanisms.
- Integrate with an internal platform for authentication, GPU inference capabilities, and usage monitoring, maintaining system resilience during downtimes, and enforcing data privacy and multi-tenant isolation.
- Collaborate with the data science team to establish product-to-model agreements and with frontend engineers to define API contracts.
- Maintain architecture decision records, lead design discussions, and provide support for the existing TypeScript service until retirement.
Required Qualifications
- Minimum of 5 years of professional experience in backend engineering, with a track record of owning and managing production systems.
- Strong background in backend principles in any language, with a willingness to adapt to a Python, FastAPI, and asynchronous codebase.
- Proven ability to identify and address concurrency issues such as race conditions and data inconsistencies.
- Proficiency in PostgreSQL and SQL, including data modeling, transaction management, indexing, and migrations.
- Experience with message queues and event-driven architectures, along with integrating external services resilient to failure.
- Solid engineering practices like static typing, automated testing, code review, CI/CD, and Docker usage.
- Ability to work independently, make technical decisions, and communicate concerns effectively, with fluency in Chinese and English.
Desired Skills
- Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform.
- Familiarity with medical imaging, specifically DICOM and related libraries like pydicom, or a background in regulated healthcare software.
- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS products, particularly in handling data isolation and on-premise deployments.
- Knowledge of numerical or geometric computing, React, and TypeScript.
We may utilize artificial intelligence tools to support certain aspects of the hiring process. These tools aid the recruitment team in reviewing applications and evaluating resumes but are not a replacement for human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you have inquiries regarding data processing, please reach out to us.