Backend Engineer (3+ Years Experience)

Backend Engineer — Shelton AI About Shelton AI Shelton AI is a fintech company building AI-powered solutions for the private markets. We help institutional investors from sovereign wealth funds to pension funds unlock insights from complex financial documents. Our platform uses machine learning, NLP, and OCR pipelines to transform unstructured data into accurate, auditable information that powers high-stakes investment decisions. We’re profitable, remote-first, and growing quickly, with a team that combines deep finance and engineering expertise. The Role We’re looking for a backend engineer with strong foundations in Python and SQL who’s excited to work on data-intensive systems that integrate AI/ML document processing. You’ll design APIs, build pipelines that process millions of pages of financial documents, and make sure the resulting data is fast, reliable, and easy to query. What You’ll Do • Write clean, testable Python code and own services end-to-end. • Design and optimize SQL queries: debug slow queries, restructure schemas, and tune indexes for large datasets. • Model and manage databases (Postgres preferred, but other SQL dialects welcome) with an eye on both performance and integrity. • Build APIs and services with Django/DRF, including ORM modeling, migrations, and Celery-based background tasks. • Integrate AI/ML workflows: connect OCR, NLP, and entity extraction pipelines into production-grade backend systems. • Deploy and operate workloads in the cloud, ideally AWS (S3, RDS, IAM, SQS/SNS, Lambda/ECS). • Improve performance and reliability through profiling, monitoring, and automation. • Collaborate with product and data/ML engineers to deliver features that bridge backend systems with AI models. • What We’re Looking For • Strong experience with Python (language fundamentals, structure, testing, maintainability). • Proficiency in SQL: writing/debugging complex queries, schema/index design, and query optimization. • Hands-on experience with Django/DRF (ORM, migrations, API design, Celery). • Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS, for deploying and operating production systems. • Curiosity about AI/ML systems and how they integrate into backend pipelines. • Ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly and collaborate in a fast-paced environment. • Nice to Have • Deep experience with Postgres (EXPLAIN plans, schema refactoring, advanced indexing strategies). • Exposure to OCR/NLP/ML pipelines (Tesseract, AWS Textract, spaCy, Transformers, etc.). • Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Docker). • Background in financial data or other domains where correctness and auditability matter. Why Join Us • Competitive compensation. • Fully remote, with a distributed team. • Opportunity to solve hard technical and AI/ML problems at the intersection of finance and engineering. • A collaborative, high-growth environment where your work directly impacts institutional investors worldwide. • Potential for additional stock-based compensation based on experience Apply tot his job