Senior Backend Engineer (Data Platform)

About the Position

Bluefish AI is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own the data platform infrastructure that powers our AI marketing platform; building the systems that reliably move and process data at scale.

This role sits within the Data Engineering team and focuses on building scalable, observable, and resilient systems that handle production data. You will work closely with data engineers and product teams to level up data pipelines and ensure data acquisition scales with the business. This is an exciting opportunity to shape the future of AI‑driven technologies and make meaningful contributions to real‑world applications.

This role is based in our NYC office and follows a hybrid working policy with 3 days in office.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design and build production-grade backend services and pipelines that carry data reliably from ingestion to downstream consumers.
• Design and operate data exchange interfaces for external customers: APIs, exports, and delivery mechanisms that meet reliability, security, and contractual requirements.
• Make architectural decisions balancing cost, reliability, and throughput across distributed systems.
• Build resilient infrastructure with smart retries, backoff strategies, dead-letter handling, and failure recovery.
• Participate in end-to-end observability: structured logging, metrics, alerting, and on-call.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to integrate new data sources and serve evolving platform needs.
• Set technical direction and raise the bar on code quality, testing, and system design.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production backend or data platform systems.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals: event-driven architectures, async processing, message queues.
• Experience with AWS: SQS/SNS, Kafka, Lambda, ECS, S3, and EventBridge.
• SQL and NoSQL database experience (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB).
• Experience designing systems with robust error handling, idempotency, and reliable delivery guarantees.
• Comfortable working across languages; our stack is Python and TypeScript and you'll be expected to be productive in both.
• Experience mentoring mid/junior engineers and raising the technical bar across a team.

Nice to Have

• Experience with pipeline orchestrations.
• Background in web scraping or data acquisition at scale.
• Familiarity with vector databases or ML-adjacent infrastructure (embeddings, inference endpoints).
• Experience with big data, especially with AI/ML platforms and use-cases.
• Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform).
• Ability to partner with product, AI, BI, and data science teams as a technical thought partner, translating business and analytical needs into data platform decisions.
• Experience working across time zones in distributed teams, with a track record of defining collaboration rhythms (communication standards, documentation practices, and ceremonies) that keep geographically dispersed teams aligned.

About Bluefish:

Bluefish believes that AI represents the next major chapter of the internet – and that consumers will increasingly use AI to consume information and media online. On this new AI internet, brands will need new tools and technologies to tell their stories to consumers online – and a new marketing ecosystem will be created around AI. Bluefish is building the platform that helps brands engage consumers on this new AI channel, with powerful enterprise tools to manage AI brand safety and engage consumers with thoughtful and personalized AI marketing experiences. 

The Bluefish team is a tight-knit group of mar-tech industry veterans who previously helped build foundational ad-tech platforms now owned by Meta and Microsoft. Bluefish, the leading AI marketing platform for the Fortune 500, recently announced a $43 million Series B growth financing co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA with participation from multiple enterprise investors including Amex Ventures, TIAA Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and continued participation from Bloomberg Beta. We are a globally distributed team, with business operations based in New York City and engineering based in Europe and New York.  

Why Bluefish & Our Values:

• Unique opportunity to join on the ground floor of a fast-moving startup building at the center of AI 
• Tackle challenging and abstract problems while disrupting the $300BN legacy mar-tech industry 
• Join an experienced high-performing team where you will have immediate ownership and impact 
• Experience a true meritocracy with significant career growth upside as the business scales 

Our Values:

• Demonstrated grit and resourcefulness - you find creative solutions, adapt quickly, and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
• Thoughtful and strategic thinker with the ability to anticipate needs, ask the right questions, and deliver insights that truly drive value.
• Proven ability to collaborate across functions and roles, fostering open communication and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Commitment to craftsmanship - you take pride in delivering high-quality work, paying attention to the small details while keeping the big picture in mind.
• Self-starter with a proactive mindset and a strong sense of accountability - able to drive projects forward independently while staying aligned with team goals.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and learning new tools, processes, or technologies to get the job done.