Senior Backend Engineer (Learn - Core Systems)

About Sana

We're on a mission to revolutionize how humans access knowledge through artificial intelligence. Throughout history, breakthroughs in knowledge sharing—from the Library of Alexandria to the printing press to Google—have been pivotal drivers of human progress. Today, as the volume of human knowledge grows exponentially, making it accessible and actionable remains one of humanity's most critical challenges. We're building a future where knowledge isn't just more accessible—it's a catalyst for achieving the previously impossible. If all of this sounds exciting, you’re in the right place.

About The Role

This role focuses on making the Learn platform (with emphasis on Manage, Insights, and APIs) scalable and maintainable for enterprise use. The main responsibility is to take systems that work at current scale and redesign them to handle significantly larger volumes of data, users, and entities (10–20x). The work is primarily architectural and system-level, addressing core bottlenecks and phasing out legacy implementations. Strong database expertise, particularly with Postgres, is valuable for success in this role.

In This Role, You Will

• Redesign existing components to support enterprise-scale workloads, including high volumes of data and entities.
• Analyze and resolve deep-rooted system bottlenecks in storage, query performance, APIs, and data models.
• Lead the migration away from legacy implementations, ensuring replacements are sustainable and consistent.
• Improve the reliability and efficiency of APIs and integrations, ensuring they can support both internal services and external enterprise clients.
• Drive technical projects from definition to delivery, including setting scope, coordinating with Product Managers, and aligning with other engineering teams.
• Maintain a long-term view of system health and ensure architectural decisions enable future growth and development speed.
• Share technical knowledge with the team, review designs, and help establish best practices for backend and systems design.

What Success Looks Like

• Focus on underlying architecture and scalability rather than short-term fixes.
• Proactively identify risks and propose technical solutions before issues become critical.
• Balance hands-on coding with architectural design and technical leadership.
• Ensure Learn’s core systems can support larger enterprise customers without performance or reliability degradation.
• Apply solid database knowledge (Postgres, schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies) to improve performance and scalability

What We Offer

• Help shape AI's future alongside brilliant minds from Notion, Dropbox, Slack, Databricks, Google, McKinsey, and BCG.
• Competitive salary complemented with a transparent and highly competitive options program.
• Swift professional growth in an evolving environment, supported by a culture of continuous feedback and mentorship from senior leaders.
• Work with talented teammates across 5+ countries, collaborate with customers globally and work in our offices in New York, London and Stockholm. 
• Regular team gatherings and events (recently in Italy and South Africa)