Backend Engineer at Ascensions Studio

About the role

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to develop and maintain a production grade- Python/ FastAPI backend platform. The role involves building scalable REST APIs, managing background processing workflows, integrating external services, handling billing functionality, and maintaining reliable data persistence within a modular, service-oriented architecture.

What you'll do

Design, develop, and maintain REST APIs with well-defined request and response contracts
Build and manage asynchronous background workflows, including job queues, status tracking, retries, and cancellation mechanisms
Integrate third-party services such as AI/ML platforms, payment gateways, and cloud storage providers
Work with PostgreSQL, caching layers, and object storage solutions
Implement authentication, authorization, and usage/billing capabilities
Improve platform reliability through validation, structured error handling, logging, and monitoring
Write automated tests and support Docker-based deployment workflows

What we're looking for

Strong proficiency in Python, including asynchronous programming (async/await)
Hands-on production experience building REST APIs using FastAPI or similar frameworks
Experience with PostgreSQL and ORM/query optimization practices
Knowledge of JWT-based authentication, request validation, and structured API error handling
Experience building background jobs or working with message queues (Taskiq, Celery, Bull, etc.)
Understanding of clean, layered architecture (routes → services → data access)
Proficiency with Git, debugging, and collaborative development practices

Nice to have

Production experience with FastAPI and Pydantic.
Experience with Prisma or schema-first ORM approaches
Integration experience with third-party AI/LLM APIs, including retries, rate limiting, and cost optimization
Experience implementing Stripe subscriptions and webhook flows
Familiarity with Redis caching strategies
Experience managing Docker-based multi-service environments (API + workers + database)
Experience building media and file-processing pipelines

Hiring process

Apply, complete the assignment, then hear back from the team.

Apply → Assignment → Offer

Assignment

Build & Deploy ServerPulse

~48h

This assignment is designed to evaluate how you approach building, deploying, and operating production-grade infrastructure. Rather than testing knowledge of individual tools, we're interested in understanding your engineering decisions, automation practices, documentation, and ability to build scalable, secure, and maintainable systems. You will be working on ServerPulse, a fictional cloud platform that helps organizations monitor the health and performance of their applications. The application has already been developed, and your responsibility is to prepare it for a reliable production deployment.

What to build

ServerPulse is expected to serve thousands of users across multiple regions. The platform must remain highly available, easy to deploy, and simple to maintain as new features are released. As the Senior DevOps Engineer, your responsibility is to design and automate the infrastructure required to run the platform in production. Your solution should demonstrate modern DevOps practices including infrastructure automation, containerization, CI/CD, observability, security, and operational reliability. The goal is not simply to deploy the application, but to build an environment that another engineering team could confidently use in production.

Expectations

We expect you to design your solution with production-readiness in mind. Your infrastructure should be reproducible through Infrastructure as Code and support automated deployments with minimal manual intervention. The application should be containerized, deployed on an orchestration platform, and capable of recovering from failures automatically. Your implementation should demonstrate strong operational thinking by including appropriate monitoring, centralized logging, health checks, security best practices, and clear documentation. We encourage you to make reasonable architectural decisions and document any assumptions or trade-offs you make throughout the project.

Tech stack

AWSAzureTerraformpulumiDockerKubernetesJenkinsPrometheusGrafanaLokiElasticsearchCloudWatchKubernetes SecretsHashiCorp Vault

Resources

Apply to unlock resources

Deadline: 7 days after applying
Attempts allowed: 4

How we evaluate

Infrastructure Design – Cloud architecture, scalability, networking, and overall system design.
Infrastructure as Code – Quality, modularity, reusability, and maintainability of Terraform/Pulumi or equivalent.
CI/CD & Automation – Build, test, deployment pipelines, and deployment automation.
Containerization & Kubernetes – Docker best practices, Kubernetes configuration, deployments, services, scaling, and resilience.
Security – Secret management, IAM, networking, least privilege, image security, and overall security practices.
Monitoring & Observability – Logging, metrics, dashboards, alerts, and troubleshooting capabilities.