Senior Backend Data Engineer (AI)

Location: Budapest, Hungary; hybrid with onsite work required on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday strongly encouraged.

Salary: HUF 1.5M–2.2M per month

Company

hirify.global creates education technology products that support learning, personal development, and collaboration between educators and students.

What you will do

• Own data models and storage architecture for AI systems across relational, graph, and retrieval-oriented data.
• Build and operate APIs, backend services, and pipelines that keep data current and accessible.
• Design ingestion and update workflows covering incremental processing, schema changes, data-quality checks, and safe backfills.
• Own data correctness, query performance, scalability, reliability, observability, and operational efficiency.
• Turn prototypes into production-ready data services, scoring workflows, and retrieval components.
• Collaborate with data scientists, applied AI engineers, and infrastructure engineers on deployment and operations.

Requirements

• Six or more years of experience building and operating production backend, data, or distributed systems.
• Strong production experience with Python and SQL, including APIs, schema design, query optimization, and complex datasets.
• Deep experience with relational data systems and sound judgment in selecting graph or specialized databases.
• Experience designing production services with API contracts, versioning, error handling, and performance considerations.
• Hands-on AWS deployment and operations using containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and production debugging tools.
• Strong practices in testing, code review, observability, documentation, and maintaining systems used by other teams.

Nice to have

• Production experience operating graph databases, including traversal performance and query tuning at scale.
• Experience with versioned, bitemporal, or event-sourced data systems.
• Experience with vector search or semantic retrieval using pgvector, OpenSearch, Pinecone, or similar tools.
• Experience with multi-tenant data design and per-tenant isolation.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employees participate in an ownership program.
• Generous time off, local holidays, and an annual late-December recharge period based on departmental needs.
• Wellness programs and mental health support.
• Learning and development resources, professional development tools, and tuition reimbursement.
• Mentorship, hack weeks, internal conferences, employee recognition, and an inclusive collaborative culture.

Hiring process

• Background check and identity verification are required for all employees.
• Identity verification may include legal name, current physical location, contact number, and residential address in accordance with local privacy laws.