About LearnWise AI

We’re an AI-first startup helping universities and colleges support students and faculty with smart, knowledge-driven tools. Small team, high ownership, real user impact. LearnWise is a place where the best idea wins—no matter who says it—and where innovation and growth are in our DNA.

You’ll work closely with our Head of AI, CTO, and Head of Product.

Why this role exists

We’re building out the backend and infrastructure that powers our AI assistants and student engagement tools. We need an engineer who loves writing and scaling backend systems from the API layer down to the database and infrastructure level. Someone who can design solid APIs, data flows, and services, and then wire them up to LLMs, RAG pipelines, and experimentation frameworks.

This role is about making the backend powering our AI reliable, observable, and production-ready.

Important: this is NOT an AI/ML role. You will be working with the AI team, and interface with AI systems daily - but 95% of the work with squarely fall under the “backend development” bucket!

What you’ll do

• Build, maintain and scale backend services for AI features
  • Implement, maintain and scale Python/FastAPI services that power our chat assistants and student-facing workflows.
  • Optimize, refactor, and stabilize essential systems across the stack. We’re transitioning from a fast-moving early startup to a high-growth scale-up - you’ll help ease our growing pains.
• Testing, observability & reliability
  • Help improve our guardrails and observability: logging, tracing, and alerts for AI features and backend services.
  • Help debug tricky production issues and sift through the noise to identify and resolve the root causes.
• Experimentation & iteration
  • Work with AI, Product, and Design to ship experiments fast and measure their impact.
  • Propose and prototype new backend or AI capabilities that meaningfully improve our product and internal tooling.
• Startup-style ad-hoc work
  • Jump in on bug-fixes, internal tooling, or data tasks when needed.
  • Help improve our developer experience, CI/CD, and internal docs

Non-negotiable requirements:

• You are smart, pragmatic, and love building backend systems.
• You understand that there are two sides (https://juraj.blog/p/two-sides) to software engineering and work comfortably in both.
• You can operate both as owner and as executor. At times we need a new system designed from scratch - at others, we just need to add another API integration. You enjoy doing the grunt work (sometimes!).
• STRONG ASYNC PYTHON skills, and solid understanding of advanced python concepts and libraries such as: event loops, async generators, anyio streams, decorators, generics, etc.