Backend Engineer (Python / FastAPI)
Rim Universe is building an AI-native platform for animated and serialized video content creation. Our platform helps creators transform ideas and scripts into structured production workflows, including story development, character creation, episode and shot planning, AI image/video generation, and editing.
We are currently expanding our engineering team and looking for a *Backend Engineer* to help build the core backend infrastructure powering our platform. If you're passionate about AI video creation, we'd love to have you join our team and help turn more great stories into amazing videos!
About the Role:
As a Backend Engineer at Rim Universe, you will be responsible for building and maintaining backend systems supporting *AI model integrations, generation workflows, media asset management, and user/project data*.
You will work closely with our AI and product teams to build reliable, scalable backend services that support AI-powered content generation in a production environment.
Responsibilities:
- Design, develop, and maintain backend services using *Python and FastAPI*
- Build and maintain *REST APIs* for our platform
- Integrate third-party APIs, including *LLM, image generation, and video generation models*
- Design and optimize *PostgreSQL* databases and queries
- Build asynchronous AI generation workflows, including task queues, status tracking, retries, failure handling, and webhooks
- Develop backend systems for users, projects, generated content, and media assets
- Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot services in *Docker/Linux* environments
- Improve system reliability, scalability, maintainability, and performance
- Collaborate with AI, frontend, and product team members to deliver production-ready features
Requirements:
- *2+ years* of backend development experience, with at least one project taken through development, launch and ongoing maintenance.
- Strong *Python* skills and hands-on production experience with *FastAPI* or *Django*. Able to quickly read and maintain an existing codebase.
- Experience with *PostgreSQL*, database design, and SQL optimization.
- Understands how background job systems work: job state machines, *leases and heartbeats*, timeouts, *retries*, *idempotency* and *failure recovery*. Familiar with reliable messaging patterns such as the *transactional outbox*. Has used *Redis* (Streams, locks or queues).
- Experience integrating *third-party HTTP APIs*, including authentication, *async callbacks*, *status polling*, *rate limiting* and *error classification*. Understands why a *pay-per-call API* must not be blindly retried when the outcome of a call is unknown.
- Experience with *LLM API* integration, *prompt template* management or *agent* development.
- Familiar with object storage such as *S3* or *MinIO*: *presigned URLs*, uploads and downloads, and *access control*. Able to guarantee *multi-tenant data isolation*.
- Comfortable with *Linux*, *Docker / Docker Compose* and *Git*. Able to investigate logs, manage secrets, run backup and restore, and write tests for critical flows.
Nice to Have:
- Hands-on work on *AI video, image or speech generation*, or audio/video processing; familiarity with *FFmpeg*.
- Experience with the *ComfyUI API* or building *multi-step generation workflows* (e.g. speech synthesis → video generation → lip sync).
- Experience building *Stripe *payments, subscriptions, credit ledgers or usage-based billing.
- Experience optimizing generation job performance, analyzing model costs or planning service capacity.
- Working knowledge of *Node.js / TypeScript* (our frontend BFF uses Next.js).
- Experience with global SaaS products.
What We’re Looking For:
We’re looking for someone who can take ownership of backend systems from maintaining through deployment.
You should think beyond simply implementing APIs and consider system reliability, maintainability, scalability, and production performance when designing solutions.
Rim Universe is moving quickly, so we value engineers who can work independently, solve problems proactively, and communicate clearly with the team.
Pay: $30.00 - $40.00 per hour
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- Employee discount
- Flexible schedule
Language:
- Mandarin (Preferred)
Work Location: In person