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.

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.

We care more about what you have built than where you have built it. Great people at Midjourney have started in high school just as often as they have come from notable companies and universities. If you feel like you've got most of the skills we're looking for, but are worried that it might not be enough, reach out anyway. Let's chat.

If you're more interested in user-facing product work, see our Backend Engineer, Product role instead.

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.

You might be a fit if

• You've built and operated production backend systems under real traffic.

• You're comfortable designing APIs, modeling data, and working across services rather than inside a single layer.

• You think about failure modes before they happen and build systems that behave well under load.

• You're comfortable owning production, including debugging, observability, and operational tooling.

• You enjoy making complex systems simpler.

• AI tools are part of your development workflow, and you're always looking for better ways to build software.

• You communicate clearly and work well with engineers across different disciplines.

• You care about the people around you as much as the code. Great engineering teams make each other better.

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.

• You will own meaningful slices of a system that reaches every user, including its production health. Few backend roles anywhere offer that scope on a team this small.

Logistics

• San Francisco preferred for collaboration overlap, but strong remote candidates are welcome.

• Compensation: $175,000–$200,000 + benefits.

To apply

Share your resume. We care much more about what you've made than where you've worked, though; if this sounds like you, apply even if you don't check every box.