Senior Backend Engineer

Remote, frequent trips to London Salary: $100000 - $170000 Meaningful equity About Aurora Aurora is the AI-native Lifestyle Operating System for the world's highest performers. A proactive, conversational lifestyle management product relied on by the world's top founders, athletes, and creatives to advise, execute, and manage their travel, dining, wellness, experiences, and gifting globally. Over half our members use every single day, 95% every week, and in our first 6 months, member spend & engagement is outperforming industry benchmarks by 5×. Aurora is backed and chaired by Alex Macdonald, the most successful founder in this category, and has raised $12M from experienced operators and tier-1 investors. We are now expanding the founding engineering team as we scale the product and the member base. Aurora is built in person from our offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles. The engineering team works from our London office in Belgravia, with flexible remote days. You can find our recent launch video here . The role We're hiring an ambitious Backend Engineer to work alongside our CTO and world-class engineering team to build and evolve Aurora's backend systems. You'll work with the founders, product, and other engineers to design and implement the core infrastructure behind the product. This includes APIs, background processing, agent orchestration, and data pipelines that support proactive, AI-driven behavior. This is a hands-on role with a high level of ownership. You'll be responsible for taking features from idea to production and for keeping the system reliable as usage grows. You'll report directly to the CTO. Over time, your role can grow into a broader technical or leadership position as the company scales. We ship high-polish, high-leverage products to our discerning customer base. We are urgent with our inputs and pragmatic with our outputs. Many of our early team have ambitions to be founders in the future — we view Aurora as a high-performance startup academy, where you will personally drive the evolution of a high-growth product from its earliest stages. Join us. Our Principles We’re a deeply committed team of tier-1 backed and exited operators united by our four core principles: We seek truth We are high-leverage We are owners We believe impossible is an attitude Why Aurora High Leverage Design a daily-use product placed directly in the hands of the world’s most ambitious individuals and organizations - empowering them to compound their time, relationships, and global impact. Cutting-Edge AI Work hands-on with a next-generation AI system redefining lifestyle management at the highest level, spanning context, recommendation, orchestration, and execution. Design an ultra-lightweight, ultra-high-leverage product experience that consistently wins the engagement, trust, and spend of the most powerful consumer cohort in history. Opportunity Play a foundational role in building the future of high-performance lifestyle management - a $100bn opportunity at the intersection of technology, luxury, and longevity. About the Founders Aurora was founded in 2024 by: Jonah Lowenstein , previously founder of a social e-commerce platform backed by Accel, 20VC, and the co-founder of Venmo Aurelius Zwick , won the UK’s largest youth entrepreneurship competition at age 16 Dmitry Ogurtsov , previously director of engineering at conversational AI company exited to ZoomInfo Aurora is chaired by Alex Macdonald , founder of the world’s most successful concierge - exited to Capital One for $300m. To date, we’ve raised $12M from Tier-1 VCs and operators, including the founder of Cleo, Quadpay, early investors in Supercell and Deliveroo, the President of VistaJet, and tier-1 athletes including Kevin Love and Kyle Kuzma. What you’ll do Design and build backend services and APIs using Python and Django Own features end to end, from initial design to production rollout Maintain and evolve background processing, agent orchestration, and LLM integrations Work with context-heavy data pipelines and RAG-style systems Operate and improve cloud infrastructure on GCP Improve performance across SQL queries, background jobs, and API endpoints Debug production issues and lead incident resolution Implement secure coding practices and support compliance efforts Collaborate closely with product, curators, and frontend/mobile engineers Review code and help raise the overall technical bar What we’re looking for Experience 5+ years building and operating production backend systems Strong, hands-on experience with Python and Django Backend fundamentals Deep familiarity with Django and DRF, including common pitfalls Strong SQL skills and experience with schema design and performance tuning Experience with background job systems (ideally Celery) Comfort designing reliable, observable systems Experience working with LLMs or AI infrastructure Exposure to agent-based systems or RAG pipelines Infrastructure Experience running cloud-native systems, ideally on GCP Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform Experience operating services in production, not just building them Product mindset You care about how systems are used, not just how they’re built You think in terms of reliability, latency, and failure modes You’re comfortable making trade-offs and explaining them clearly Collaboration Able to work closely with product, design, and other engineers Clear communicator who takes ownership and follows things through A want to be in-person, near the customer Nice to have Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001) Basic understanding of frontend or mobile stacks (Flutter, Vue) $2,000 Tech & Education budget Complimentary Oura ring or Whoop Complimentary longevity testing subscription Lifestyle perks, events, and access opportunities Full health benefits; 90% coverage, including full dental & vision Complimentary dinners and evening transport