Staff Backend Engineer
Winston Artory Group is an expert-led collection stewardship platform for art and collectibles. It provides appraisal expertise, advisory services, and secure collection management to collectors and their advisors.
Funding
About Winston Artory Group
Winston Artory Group supports collectors and their advisors in evaluating, acquiring, managing, and selling art and collectibles. Its services combine expert judgment, appraisal and advisory expertise, data science, sophisticated digital systems, and a large art-market database to provide stewardship for assets with financial, cultural, and personal value.
Skills
About the Role
You will lead the design and evolution of backend architecture, making key decisions about frameworks, databases, infrastructure, and engineering patterns. You will build scalable data systems and performant APIs, integrate LLM services, and create reliable event-driven pipelines. You will own infrastructure practices including CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and infrastructure as code. You will partner on technical strategy and roadmap decisions, communicate trade-offs clearly, and mentor and help hire backend engineers.
Requirements
- B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent
- 7+ years of backend engineering experience
- At least 2+ years in a technical lead, staff, or principal role at a high-growth startup or product company
- Expertise in Python, including performance, concurrency, and design patterns
- Database expertise, including query optimization, schema design, and data modeling
- Production experience integrating LLM and AI models
- Knowledge of distributed systems, event-driven architectures, message queues, and asynchronous patterns
- Production experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure
- DevOps knowledge including Docker, Kubernetes or ECS, Terraform, CI/CD, and observability
- Data engineering knowledge including ETL or ELT patterns, data storage, and pipeline orchestration
Responsibilities
- Own the backend architecture and make decisions on frameworks, databases, infrastructure, and patterns
- Define technical standards and best practices for code quality, testing, documentation, and deployment
- Lead system design for data ingestion, LLM orchestration, and real-time analytics
- Mentor and guide future backend engineers
- Evaluate and adopt technologies that improve velocity, reliability, or capabilities
- Build and scale backend systems for structured data ingestion, cleaning, and delivery
- Design clean, performant APIs for client, data, and internal tools
- Integrate and orchestrate LLM APIs for appraisal automation, data extraction, and insight generation
- Architect event-driven systems and asynchronous pipelines
- Own CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and infrastructure as code
- Collaborate on architecture, technical roadmap, engineering standards, and product feasibility
- Communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
Benefits
- Remote-flexible work
- Generous paid time off, sick days, and holidays
- Paid parental leave
- Paid volunteer days
- Performance-based bonuses
- Equity option grants
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with 100% employee coverage
- On-site fitness center and sauna in the New York headquarters
- Bereavement and reproductive loss leave
- 401(k)
- Life insurance and disability coverage
- Office snacks