Backend Engineer
The Opportunity
Greenhouses generate terabytes of data from climate computers, sensors, and control systems. But growers are still stuck staring at dashboards, hunting for patterns, making sense of it themselves. We're changing that.
At Sera, we're building the intelligence layer that captures grower expertise and scales it across every machine, every greenhouse, every decision. Our system doesn't just display data, it reasons, recommends, and learns.
As a Backend Engineer, you'll design and scale the core platform that makes this possible: from real-time data pipelines ingesting climate and sensor data, to the APIs that power our conversational AI, to the systems that turn grower knowledge into active intelligence.
What You'll Build
- Data infrastructure, ingest, transform, and serve greenhouse data at scale (climate, sensors, crop registrations)
- APIs & services, design and build the backend that powers our conversational intelligence platform
- System architecture, own the design of scalable, reliable systems that process millions of data points daily
- Cloud infrastructure, deploy and operate services on AWS (Lambda, containers, managed services)
- Integrations, connect to climate computers (Priva, Ridder, Hoogendoorn) and third-party data sources
- Operational excellence, build observability, monitoring, and reliability into everything we ship
How You Work
We believe you'll be successful if you:
- Think problem-first, your instinct is to ask "what problem are we solving?" before jumping to solutions
- Take ownership, you see projects through from idea to production and beyond, and feel accountable for outcomes
- Build pragmatically, you find the 80/20 solution that delivers value without over-engineering
- Think in systems, you see how your service fits into the broader architecture and reason about dependencies and data flows
- Communicate clearly, you articulate complex ideas simply, in code, docs, and conversation
What We're Looking For
- Strong backend development experience (Python, REST/GraphQL APIs, relational databases)
- Experience designing and scaling distributed systems
- Solid understanding of data modeling, performance optimization, and system reliability
- Comfortable with AWS, containerization, and infrastructure-as-code
- Startup mindset: you move fast, take ownership, and thrive building from zero
Nice to Have
- Experience with real-time data streaming or time-series data
- Background in agriculture, IoT, or industrial systems
- Experience with LLM integrations or AI-powered applications
Our Tech Stack
- Backend: Python, GraphQL
- Data: RDS, Vector Databases, S3
- Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, ECS, RDS), Docker, Cloudformation
- AI/ML: Anthropic, LangChain
- Monitoring: CloudWatch, custom observability
What We Offer
- High ownership, you'll own systems end-to-end, not just tickets
- Ground-floor impact, design core AI infrastructure from scratch
- Real-world purpose, your work helps feed the world more sustainably
- Competitive compensation, salary, equity, and growth opportunities
- Learning budget, resources to grow your skills
- Modern equipment, the tools you need to do your best work
How We Work
We're a small, high-performance team solving a hard problem. We move fast, ship often, and learn constantly. We value velocity and pragmatism over process and bureaucracy. AI is core to how we build, we use the best tools available (Claude, Cursor, etc.) to accelerate development. If you're energized by autonomy, ownership, and seeing your work create real impact, you'll thrive here.
Join us to build the intelligence layer that helps humans and machines work side by side in agriculture.
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At Sera, we value diverse backgrounds and perspectives. If you're excited about this role but don't tick every box, we encourage you to apply anyway, we'd love to hear from you.