Backend Engineer II

Ordaos is seeking an experienced Backend Engineer to be a part of our ongoing mission to create bespoke mini-proteins to enable ground-breaking therapeutics. This Senior Backend Engineer will work directly with other Ordaos backend engineers, AI Scientists, DevOps Engineers, and End Users to support novel experiments running on our AI Platform.

We are looking for someone who is AI-native, deeply familiar with modern AI coding tools and workflows (such as code generation, agentic development, and LLM-augmented tooling) that can significantly accelerate backend development. The ideal candidate moves fast, leverages automation, and knows how to work efficiently in a rapidly evolving AI-driven environment.

Why Ordaos is hiring for this role

Ordaos develops state-of the-art machine learning models to create, modify and characterize proteins. These models are then integrated into a web application to be used experimentally by our end users (in-house biologists). New requirements from these end users and changes to the models require the infrastructure of the back-end to be extended and changed frequently. It will be the responsibility of this new back-end engineer to design and implement these changes.

Some of the day-to-day may include

• Designing efficient data structures that will hold inputs, intermediate results, and outputs from our machine learning algorithms
• Implementing changes and extensions to our system as required by ML models and end-user requests
• Interacting and collaborating with stakeholders from different backgrounds to completely understand the requirements, and translate their needs into functional code
• Interfacing to multiple databases
• Working with our AI Scientists to implement and productionalize ML-powered features
• Collaborating with other engineers on the team to ensure everyone can ship code quickly and the system is working reliably

Requirements

• BA or Masters in computer science
• Excellent python programmer as evidenced, for example, through the development of complex fast.api or celery-based web applications
• Proven ability to leverage AI-native development tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI API) to dramatically increase coding speed and quality. We’re looking for someone who codes 10x faster by working with AI, not around it.
• Have built and scaled applications that rely on cloud services
• Knowledge of common data structures and algorithms
• Capable to design, implement and debug object-oriented python code
• Capable to write maintainable python code for a large-scale code base

• Capable to interface to SQL databases through SQLAlchemy and SQL directly
• Strong knowledge of linux
• Familiarity with git
• Experienced in using third party libraries and APIs
• Full-stack experience is not required
• Excitement for continually monitoring and improving the health of our code base

Preferred

• Experience with Redis
• Experience with Celery
• Experience with Python Kubernetes API

Hourly rate $30-$50 per hour, based on education and prior experience

Benefits

Ordaōs is a human-enabled, machine-driven drug design company. Our flagship solution, mini-PRO™, is a bespoke class of mini-proteins that help pharma and biotechs around the world deliver safer and more effective life-saving treatments in a fraction of the time of traditional discovery methods. miniPRO proteins are created and evaluated in silico, and then rigorously tested in vitro, which enables us to reliably and repeatedly deliver de novo solutions that meet our client’s stringent requirements at scale, including novelty and probability of clinical success. At Ordaōs, we help birth novel therapies that reduce patient suffering, improve health, and extend life.

Ordaos is committed to equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination for all employees and qualified applicants without regard to a person’s race, color, gender, age, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation or any characteristic protected under applicable law. Ordaos will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities, in accordance with applicable law.

Ordaos’ mission is to use technology, top talent, and a culture of curiosity to increase the speed and efficacy of drug development. We are building an intelligent drug discovery platform to reduce the drug discovery timeline from six years to six days. We are interdisciplinary thinkers who are passionate about technology and biomedicine. We are hiring immediately.