Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

About this role

A Note on applying to Pangram:

At Pangram, we firmly believe that genuine human expression, and our ability to communicate with each other online and through the written word, is a fundamental right- and a value worth preserving.

Please don't use AI to answer any of the questions as part of your application - we want to hear from you!

About Pangram Labs

Pangram Labs’ mission is to protect authenticity and preserve human connection in the context of the generative AI era. We build the world’s best AI detection systems. We publish research on state-of-the-art AI detection techniques and algorithms and build products to bring our technology into people's daily lives. We provide tools for individuals, institutions and companies to detect the use of AI in written content.

Pangram is a recognized thought leader in the space of AI detection. Our CEO & Co-founder Max Spero has been named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/max-spero/ and Pangram has been named one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2026 https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/pangram-3-0/.

We are looking for high agency, mission-driven, and passionate builders to join our team!

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer (Backend) at Pangram, you will design, build, and scale the production systems that serve our core technology to a rapidly growing user base and own the backend infrastructure that powers Pangram's AI detection platform. This is a senior, high-autonomy role: you'll make architectural decisions, solve hard scaling problems, and ensure our systems are reliable and performant as demand grows. You'll work across our Django backend and AWS infrastructure, collaborating closely with our frontend and machine learning teams.

This is a full-time, on-site role in our Brooklyn office reporting to our CTO.

What You'll Do

- Design and implement scalable backend services and APIs to serve AI detection capabilities at scale

- Own the reliability, performance, and observability of production systems

- Architect and maintain data pipelines, caching layers, and service infrastructure on AWS

- Collaborate with ML engineers to deploy and serve machine learning models in production

- Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the stack as traffic and complexity increase

- Establish and improve engineering best practices around testing, deployment, and incident response

Qualifications:

You are a great fit for this role if you have:

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong backend focus

- Proficiency in Python and Django (or comparable Python web frameworks)

- Deep understanding of backend architecture patterns: RESTful API design, relational databases, message queues, caching strategies, and asynchronous task processing

- Hands-on experience with AWS services (e.g., EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, Lambda)

- Experience designing systems for high availability, horizontal scalability, and graceful degradation

- Strong debugging and performance-profiling skills in production environments

Strongly Preferred

- Experience with containerization (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)

- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)

- Experience with monitoring and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)

Nice to Have

You are an exceptional fit for this role if you also have:

- Experience deploying and serving deep learning models in production (model serving frameworks, GPU infrastructure, batch vs. real-time inference)

- Familiarity with React or frontend technologies sufficient to collaborate effectively across the stack