Senior Backend Engineer

Hi 👋 — I'm Pavlos Kallis, Head of Engineering at Douleutaras (YourHero). We're looking for a senior backend engineer who wants to own hard problems end-to-end, cares more about the person on the other side of the code than about the ticket, and leaves our systems better than they found them.

We're a tech-enabled company disrupting home services — a €6 Trillion global market where less than 5% is online. Since 2015 we've helped 1,000,000+ customers across Greece, Cyprus, and Ireland find the right professional. Our 18,000+ active pros have earned €100m+ through the platform, we've collected 250,000+ reviews, and we hold an NPS of 75+. We're backed by top-tier European investors.

What you'll actually work on

No adjectives — here's the range of problems our engineering team owns, drawn straight from what we've shipped this year:

• The matching & bidding engine. When a customer posts a job, we decide which professionals see it, in what order, and how they bid for it — the ranking, pro-scoring (refreshed hourly), and Extra Bids systems behind "who gets this job." Flood a good pro or starve a customer of offers and the marketplace breaks.
• Money that has to be right. Online payments, pro subscriptions, cashback and bonuses, promo codes, VAT in quotes — moving money between customers, pros, and us across three countries and currencies, wired into Stripe and our Softone ERP.
• Keeping it fast and boring while it grows. We migrated the whole platform onto Kubernetes and run platform-wide performance epics. You'll help keep a zero-downtime system quick and unexciting to operate — the highest compliment infrastructure can earn.

And around all of that: trust & safety, a healthy experimentation culture (real A/B/C tests on live funnels), Salesforce/CRM integrations, and an AI stack (FastAPI + LangGraph agents doing RAG over pgvector). It's a broad surface; you won't run out of interesting problems.

How we work

You'll join our engineering squad — one tight, cross-functional team: 2 backend, 2 frontend, 1 mobile, 1 QA, 2 PMs, and a designer — working from a shared roadmap. You sit close to the whole product, not in a backend silo. In practice:

• You ship to production continuously through a rock-solid GitLab CI → ArgoCD / Argo Rollouts GitOps pipeline. Deploys are boring on purpose.
• You own features end-to-end — design, build, test, monitor — and you're trusted to make technical calls in your area.
• We review each other's code seriously and hold a high bar. Refactoring is expected, not begrudged.
• We pair, we write things down, and we help each other across disciplines.

AI-assisted development

AI-assisted coding is a normal part of how we build here, not a novelty. We give engineers access to tools like Claude Code. What we care about is judgment: you use it to move faster on the mechanical parts, and you review what it produces as critically as any teammate's code. We don't measure you by how much AI you use — and "the AI wrote it" is never an excuse for code you don't understand or can't stand behind.

Why you should — or shouldn't — apply

I'd rather you self-select honestly than be surprised in month two.

You'll thrive here if:

• You can't stand corporate bureaucracy. We're one small team that moves fast with minimal process — few meetings, a short path from idea to production, and no red tape between you and shipping.
• You take ownership of ambiguous, high-stakes problems. You build the right abstraction, not just the requested change.
• You care deeply about correctness and data. When money and a pro's livelihood ride on your code, "it seems to work" isn't enough. You reach for tests, metrics, and EXPLAIN plans.
• You balance speed and quality. We ship fast, but we're not cowboys — we've earned trust by being reliable.
• You communicate with candor and welcome direct feedback without getting defensive.
• You act like an owner — accountable, goal-oriented, and generous with teammates.

You probably shouldn't apply if:

• You picture "senior / staff / lead" as mostly reviewing designs and signing off on architecture. Our most experienced engineers spend most of their time building — we hand them our hardest problems. They set technical direction and help others plan the tough work, but that's earned influence, not a gate: nobody needs their sign-off to ship.
• You lose the forest for the trees. Once you're deep in implementation it's hard for you to zoom back out to the whole project — and you'd rather everything be specced upfront than adjust as you learn.
• You haven't owned a project end-to-end. You're most comfortable when a tech lead slices the work into tickets and hands them over. Here you take a problem brief and drive it yourself.
• You want only greenfield work. Real systems mean production incidents, legacy corners (we're retiring an old Angular frontend and some Gulp tooling), and customer investigations shared across the team.

Our tech stack

We care about fundamentals over stack familiarity; how you think and how fast you learn matter far more than years-in-Django.

• Backend: Python 3.10, Django 4.2, DRF, UV, Docker
• Data: PostgreSQL 14 / PostGIS, Elasticsearch 7.x, Redis, Memcached
• Async: Celery on RabbitMQ
• AI: FastAPI, LangChain, LangGraph, OpenAI + Anthropic (Claude), pgvector
• Frontend (adjacent): React, TypeScript, Flutter/Dart
• Platform: Kubernetes (EKS) on AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, Cloudflare
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, New Relic, Sentry, PostHog

What we'd love you to bring

• 5+ years building and scaling production backend services, with strong Python / Django and REST API depth.
• You've designed systems, not just implemented tickets — you define service and API boundaries, weigh architectural trade-offs, and can explain why you chose one over another.
• Real PostgreSQL depth at scale — data modeling, query optimization, indexing, and keeping correctness under concurrency (this is a money-handling marketplace).
• Asynchronous / distributed systems experience — background processing, queues (Celery or similar), and a healthy respect for their failure modes.
• You own what you ship in production — comfortable with observability, debugging live incidents, and treating tests as part of the work, not an afterthought.
• Experience leading projects end-to-end and lifting the engineers around you — technical direction, serious code review, mentoring by example.
• Comfort with Docker + Kubernetes, a major cloud (AWS preferred), and CI/CD;
• Excellent English and interest in joining a remote, multicultural team.

Bonus points: Terraform (IaC) · FastAPI · LLM & agentic experience (LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, pgvector) · payments/fintech or marketplace background · a startup or high-performance-team environment.