LearnWise is a company where the best idea always wins - no matter what - and where innovation and hyper growth is in our DNA. Backend Engineers build our scalable infrastructure, solve core challenges, and are the future owners of our LearnWise.ai platform!

Reports to: CTO

Work alongside: Head of Product, Engineers (Backend, Frontend, AI, QA), CX team

Job Description

LearnWise.ai is a scale-up modernizing educational institutions with virtual assistants, instructor efficiency, and student engagement solutions for higher education institutions. We are looking for an inspired and enthusiastic Backend Python Engineer to join our team in a full time capacity.

You will have the chance to join a Venture Capital funded company with a track record of exponential growth. You will work closely with our leadership as a member of our LearnWise pack. We require creativity, innovation, deep thinking, autonomy and leadership from all team members including interns. You will drive these values on your team. You will have the freedom (and expectation from our leadership) to develop and implement your own ideas.

What you’ll do:

Development & Maintenance

• Design, implement, and maintain RESTful APIs and microservices using Python and FastAPI
• Build data models and manage MongoDB schemas to support scalable, performant storage
• Write clean, well-tested code and enforce coding standards through code reviews
• Debug, profile, and optimize application performance to ensure low latency and high throughput

Infrastructure & Deployment

• Configure and manage AWS resources (ECS,EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, etc.) to support production workloads
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions, Docker and IAC
• Deploy backend services to AWS and monitor availability, error rates, and security
• Implement logging, monitoring, and alerting (Grafana/Sentry) to ensure systems health and monitoring

Collaboration & Innovation

• Partner with the Head of Product and Frontend Engineers to translate requirements into technical designs
• Contribute to architecture discussions, evaluate new technologies, and suggest improvements to our tech stack
• Participate in sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospective meetings to continuously improve team processes
• Share best practices, mentor junior engineers, and help cultivate a culture of learning and experimentation

Requirements:

• Minimum 5 years of work experience building backend services in Python with Python3.10+ (we are aware Python3.10 was released in 2021, but you get the point here — you know Python and you are good at it)
• Fluent using essential web framework FastAPI (or similar ones like Flask or Django, but we strongly prefer experience in FastAPI)
• Deep familiarity and understanding of modern web authentication and authorization protocols, frameworks, and best practices — including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SSO, JWT, token- and cookie-based auth, and session management — and a strong understanding of how these mechanisms impact frontend architecture, state management, and user experience.
• You know the value of well typed code, and have deep understanding of typing, modeling, serialization and validation with Pydantic
• Proven expertise designing and managing MongoDB databases at scale
• Extraordinary understanding of asyncio and concurrent code concepts
• Testing extraordinaire using Pytest (or similar Python testing frameworks)
• Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and not afraid to write some infrastructure-as-code (IAC)
• You are proficient in Git and Github. You also understand rebasing, cherry-picking and software versioning
• Based in the Netherlands and willing to visit our Amsterdam office (once in a while :)
• You proactively take the lead in projects, from ideation to deployment, and are passionate about improving higher education with technology
• Hungry to learn about AI applications and integrate intelligent features into services
• You seek constructive criticism and are direct and open with others
• You are fluent in English (spoken and written)

Nice to Haves

• Experience with modern Python dependency management and tooling (Poetry/UV)
• You love setting the bar for perfect code quality and maintainability (ruff/black/pyright/pylance)
• Experience with MongoDB Atlas cluster creating, managing and optimizing, and Mongo’s async driver Motor (or async Pymongo)
• Experience and understanding of AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, ECS, ECR) and deploying frontend applications on Vercel
• Good plus if you have some level of understanding of the AI ecosystem: AI providers, LLM’s, embedding, re-ranking, search, clustering, MCP, Langcahin/Llama, tracing, OCR
• Some Javascript knowledge never hurts
• Some PHP8 knowledge — to be clear, we don’t love PHP but its inevitable to run into it from time to time in the Educational Technology ecosystem 😕

What's in it for you?

• Competitive base salary
• Hybrid work policy: flexible working arrangements, including remote work options
• Daily guidance from our CTO and engineering leadership
• Opportunity to shape our backend architecture and influence technical roadmap
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI technologies and a chance to make a meaningful impact in the EdTech industry
• Desire to grow with the company into a leadership role.

If you are passionate about building software, interested in working for a startup, and excited about the opportunity to work on innovative AI projects that make an impact for students just like you, we would love to hear from you!