Backend Engineer, Core Systems

About Midjourney

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species. We are a small, self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI.

About The Role

Everything at Midjourney depends on a small number of backend systems. They route requests, move work through our infrastructure, manage data, connect products to inference, and keep the whole platform running reliably as it evolves. We're looking for a Backend Engineer to help build and operate those systems. You'll work across the backend stack, designing services, evolving schemas, improving observability, and keeping production healthy. This isn't a role where you'll own a single microservice. We expect you to understand how the pieces fit together, make thoughtful architectural decisions, and leave the system simpler than you found it. We don't have a separate SRE organization. Reliability, operations, debugging, and capacity planning are part of engineering here. As Midjourney grows, one of your most important jobs will be making sure the backend grows without becoming unnecessarily complicated.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate the backend systems that power Midjourney.
• Own meaningful parts of the platform from schema to service to deployment and production health.
• Build the tooling and observability that help the team understand production systems before something breaks.
• Respond to production issues and turn each one into a lasting improvement.
• Simplify systems as they grow by reducing complexity and building abstractions that stand the test of time.
• Partner closely with inference, infrastructure, and product engineers as the platform evolves.
• Ship code that reaches production quickly.

Nice to Have

• Experience operating Postgres or similarly load-bearing data stores at scale, including schema evolution under live traffic.
• Experience with high-throughput async job systems (queues, schedulers, workers).
• Background designing the seam between a product backend and an ML inference platform.
• Familiarity with HPC and fleet orchestration concepts (Slurm, Ansible, multi-region operations).

Why Midjourney

Speed of a startup, freedom and resources of a research lab. No investors, no quarterly reporting cycle, no committees deciding the roadmap. Tiny team, large ambitions. Decisions show up in production within days. We move at the speed of thought. Iterate fast, isolate variables, ship.

Logistics

• Flexible location. London or San Francisco preferred for time-zone overlap, but strong remote candidates are welcome.
• Compensation: 175,000–$200,000 + benefits.