We're looking for a Senior Python Backend Developer to join the Platform team and take ownership of core backend systems powering **Aghanim** — a direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform that helps mobile game developers monetize outside app stores. We act as a **Merchant of Record**, handling payments, compliance, and taxation across **200+ territories**, while providing game studios with tools for **LiveOps automation, player segmentation, and community engagement**.
The platform serves **100+ live games** through customizable **Game Hubs** (DTC web stores), in-game offers, subscriptions, and virtual currency systems — all with **real-money transactions** requiring high reliability and fraud protection.
The codebase follows **domain-driven design** with **60+ business domains**, strict code quality standards, and **AI-assisted development** as a standard part of the workflow. You'll work across a modern Python stack — **FastAPI, SQLAlchemy v2, PostgreSQL, Redis** — with a heavy integration layer connecting game backends, payment providers, and external services.
## **What You'll Do**
- *Feature & Domain Ownership**
- Drive design and implementation of new features and business domains end-to-end — from technical design to production rollout.
- Make architectural decisions: define domain boundaries, choose patterns, design data models and APIs.
- *Backend Development**
- Write clean, maintainable, and testable Python code following team conventions.
- Design and build APIs, background workers, and event consumers with clear layered architecture.
- Write tests (unit, integration, functional) and define testing strategies for new domains.
## **What We're Looking For**
- *Required**
- Python 5+ years of commercial experience.
- Strong experience with **FastAPI** or similar async frameworks (Starlette, aiohttp).
- Deep knowledge of **SQLAlchemy** (preferably v2) — ORM internals, relationships, performance tuning, migrations (**Alembic**).
- **PostgreSQL** — advanced query optimization, indexing strategies, schema design, partitioning.
- **Redis** — caching strategies, rate limiting, distributed locks, pub/sub patterns.
- Proven experience designing and building REST APIs with clear layered architecture.
- **Pydantic** — data validation, serialization, complex schema design.
- Strong understanding of async/await patterns, concurrency, and event loops in Python.
- Experience integrating with third-party APIs and building reliable webhook/callback systems.
- Experience designing systems and making architectural decisions — choosing patterns, defining domain boundaries, managing technical debt.
- Solid testing culture: **pytest**, async tests, fixtures, factories, coverage strategy.
- Experience mentoring developers and conducting meaningful code reviews.
- Git, CI/CD, trunk-based or feature-branch workflows.
- AI: confident use of AI tools in daily development — from code generation and refactoring to debugging, test writing, and code review; with an understanding of risks (hallucinations, security, licensing) and mandatory result validation.
- *Nice to Have**
- Experience with **Google Cloud** services (BigQuery, Firestore, Pub/Sub, BigTable, Cloud Storage).
- Experience with background job processing (**ARQ**, Celery, or similar).
- Experience with webhook delivery systems, retry strategies, and idempotency.
- Experience with **Datadog**, Sentry, or similar observability tools.
- Experience in gaming, e-commerce, or fintech domains.
- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
- Experience with event-driven architecture and message queues.
- Experience with high-load systems and horizontal scaling.
## **What Success Looks Like**
- New features and domains are delivered end-to-end with clean architecture, solid test coverage, and no reliability regressions.
- Integrations with game backends and external services work reliably under production load.
- Codebase quality stays high — your code reviews and mentoring raise the bar for the team.
- Production incidents in your areas are rare, and when they happen, they're resolved quickly with permanent fixes.
- You're a go-to person for architectural decisions and technical design within the team.
## **Why Join Us**
- Modern Python stack (3.13, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy v2) with real architectural ownership.
- Small team (15–20 engineers) with high autonomy and fast decision-making.
- Strict engineering culture: enforced code standards, comprehensive test guidelines, AI-assisted development.
- Direct impact on a platform serving 100+ live games with real-money transactions across 200+ territories.
- Mission-driven company helping game developers achieve financial independence from app stores.
- Opportunity to shape backend architecture, engineering practices, and team standards in a fast-growing startup.
