Backend Engineer
We are a sports and entertainment representation database. Companies use it to find out who represents athletes and talent. We’re a small, data-heavy team, and our research team keeps hundreds of thousands of records current.
Our goal is to map the entertainment and sports industries: who represents whom, and how that changes over time. Our data is only valuable if it’s accurate, so accuracy comes before speed in everything we build.
*English needs to be good enough to have video meetings
The role
You’ll own two areas of work:
- Our internal Python apps. These include Django apps that power member-facing data on our WordPress site, such as a festival lineup database and sports agency market share data, plus a Flask research tool our team uses daily for roster processing and verification. You’ll maintain, fix, extend and deploy them.
AI automations that save our research team time. For example, given a list of names, automatically find each person’s official social media accounts, the languages they speak, and other basic public information. Results come back with confidence scores, and a person reviews them before anything is saved.
Who thrives here
We’re a small company moving fast, and this role is for someone who wants that. You’ll be the developer on the team, not one of many, so what you build, fix or improve has a direct, visible impact.
- Strong work ethic. You take ownership of your work and see it through. When something breaks or a deadline is close, you stay with it until it’s done. Comfortable with working weekends if thats what it takes.
- Comfortable with pace and change. Priorities can shift week to week, sometimes because of a launch, a news cycle or a sports season. You adapt quickly without needing every detail planned in advance.
- Self-directed. No one will hand you a perfect spec every time. You ask the right questions, make sensible decisions, and keep work moving.
- Flexibility when it counts. Some deadlines, like a season launch or a major report, need extra hours, sometimes outside your usual schedule or on weekends. We need someone who’s willing to step up at those times.
How we work
We want a developer who thinks like an owner, not someone who waits to be assigned tickets. That means:
- Contributing to the product. Give input on our goals and suggest better ways to reach them. If you see a technical way to map the industry faster or more accurately, bring it to us.
- Taking initiative. Look for ways to move the project forward on your own: automating manual work, improving our tools, and fixing problems before they become ours.
- Treating accuracy as essential. Our team verifies large volumes of data every day. Help us build processes and tools that keep data accurate at scale, with checks and safeguards rather than shortcuts.
- Using AI with judgment. We use AI tools heavily and expect you to as well. Because AI writes much of the code, your judgment is the job: review everything before it ships, catch security and data problems, ask questions when a request is unclear, and push back when something won’t work. We are not looking for someone who passes our requests to an AI and ships what comes back.
Requirements
- 3+ years of Python, including Django in production
- Comfortable working in Flask
- Has built real features on LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic or similar), such as structured output, tool use or web search
- Experience building REST APIs and connecting systems to each other
- Solid with PostgreSQL or MySQL, including schema design and migrations
- Deploys and maintains apps on Linux servers (we use DigitalOcean)
- Works through Git, pull requests and code review
- Strong written and spoken English. You’ll work directly with a non-technical founder on regular calls.
- At least 4 hours of overlap with US Eastern time
Nice to have
- PHP or Symfony experience (our legacy data comes from a Symfony app)
- WordPress integration experience
- Data matching or deduplication work, like deciding whether two records are the same person
- HubSpot API experience
- Security experience with internal tools and private APIs