Lead Python Fullstack Engineer

About Transcenda

Transcenda is a US-headquartered, full-lifecycle product development company with 300+ team members across the US, Europe (Poland, Romania, Ukraine), and LATAM (Colombia, Brazil). We partner with Fortune 500 companies and well-funded startups to deliver world-class software products — from ideation and design through engineering and launch. Our teams are fully remote, embedded long-term with clients, and trusted as strategic thought partners on product, architecture, and engineering decisions. Transcenda provides strategy, design, and engineering for the AI era. We work forward deployed, inside your environment, close to the architecture and the decisions that shape it. We are 300+ engineers, designers, and strategists across the US, Latin America, and Europe. Senior enough to lead, disciplined enough to ship.

Interesting Facts:

- Over 300 team members.

- Fully remote - we let people work where they work best.

- We work with clients who value our opinion and thought leadership and where we can make a meaningful contribution to architectural decisions, engineering decisions, and product decisions.

- We have a strong social agenda and promote diversity and inclusion and participate in a variety of charity initiatives throughout the year.

- Since we are rapidly growing, the ability to grow and advance your career is available and at a fairly quick rate.

Our client is a talent acquisition software company that helps enterprise recruiting teams attract, engage, evaluate, schedule, and hire candidates more effectively. Its platform is particularly focused on campus and early-career hiring, recruitment events, candidate relationship management, interview scheduling, candidate engagement, and recruiting analytics.

We are looking for a hands-on Lead Python Full-Stack Engineer to serve as the primary engineer responsible for an existing enterprise platform. The role involves new feature development, production maintenance, security fixes, dependency upgrades, code reviews, and incremental modernization of the platform. You will collaborate with engineering, product, QA, and DevOps teams and provide technical direction to a part-time contributor. The role also includes participation in low-frequency on-call support for a well-monitored production environment.

[Pay attention to the screening questions - they're eliminatory]

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of the platform, from initial design and development to ongoing maintenance and operational excellence.
• Proactively identify and address technical debt and security vulnerabilities, ensuring the platform remains robust and secure.
• Design, develop, and deploy new features, collaborating with stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Optimize platform performance, scalability, and reliability through careful code design, query tuning, and infrastructure management.
• Contribute to and uphold architectural conventions, ensuring consistency and maintainability across the codebase.
• Mentor and guide a part-time contributor, providing technical direction and feedback on their work.
• Participate in on-call rotations to address production incidents, leveraging monitoring tools to quickly diagnose and resolve issues.
• Drive incremental modernization efforts, strategically upgrading dependencies and refactoring code to improve the developer experience and platform health.

Must haves

• Strong experience with Python and production experience with Django and Django REST Framework.
• Experience designing and developing REST APIs.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and/or MySQL.
• Strong SQL knowledge, including query optimization, index design, data modeling, and ORM usage.
• Experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, and React.js.
• Experience with asynchronous processing and task queues using Celery, Redis, or comparable technologies.
• Experience with AWS and containerized production environments.
• Working knowledge of web application security and authentication flows.
• Experience with Claude Code or similar AI coding tools, such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or Codex.
• Ability to review, validate, and take ownership of AI-generated code
• Upper-intermediate English or stronger.
• Full-time availability.
• Residence in Brazil, Poland, or Romania.

As a plus

• TDD and QA automation experience.
• Understanding of software design patterns and scalable architecture principles.
• Familiarity with Docker or other containerized environments.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures and algorithms.
• Experience with high-load production systems.
• Experience modernizing mature or legacy applications.
• Experience with additional backend languages, such as Node.js or Java.
• Experience with enterprise SaaS platforms.