Senior Backend Engineer

For most people, buying or selling a car is one of the biggest financial decisions they make. Karnameh has several business lines that help them through it, all running on a platform of multiple microservices. Our backend engineers build that platform and keep it running, working closely with the product and business teams who depend on it.

The senior engineers who do well here have built and run systems long enough to recognise patterns, good and bad. They've seen what happens when a system is rushed or over-engineered, and they've learned to avoid both. They're curious and thoughtful, and they don't wait to be told what to do; they go after the problems that matter most. They plan carefully, but they know when sticking to a plan costs more than changing it. Above all, they make the team around them better.

The kind of work you'll do

• Services and APIs. Designing, building and evolving services, the contracts between them and the data that flows through them.
• Third-party integrations. Payment and financial providers, messaging services and partners. You don't control the other side, so timeouts, retries, duplicate or missing callbacks and reconciliation are the real work.
• Automation and AI. Internal tools for our operations and finance teams, automating work that's still done by hand, and LLM-powered features and agents.
• Reliability. Monitoring, debugging in production, performance, and following an incident through to the change that stops it from happening again.
• Data. Data models, analytical queries, pipelines and data quality.
• Evolving what already runs. Refactoring, upgrades and paying down technical debt, which is a large share of the job.

What we look for

• Experience. Usually five or more years of backend development, several of them running services in production. You've led projects with a team and product, from an unclear need to a shipped result.
• System design. You think in failure modes and trade-offs, and you're at home with transactions, idempotency, concurrency, consistency across services and migrations on live data.
• Solid foundations. Clean, well-structured Python; REST APIs, ideally with Django and DRF; SQL and relational databases; Git, Linux, and enough English to read technical documentation easily.
• Understanding before building. You make sure you've understood the problem, and you ask the questions whose answers change the design.
• Correctness. You look for the case that breaks your work before your users find it, test what you change, measure before you optimise, and check that it really worked once it's live.
• AI with judgment. You use AI tools, coding agents included, every day, and you know where they go wrong. Whoever typed the code, you understand every line you merge.
• Teamwork and communication. You share what you know, give and take code review with care, and help other engineers grow. You explain your thinking clearly, in writing and in conversation, to engineers and non-engineers alike.

Nice to have

• Experience with high-scale systems and products used by many real customers.
• Mentoring other engineers or leading a small team.
• Event-driven systems, message brokers, asynchronous task processing and caching.
• Search engines, NoSQL or analytical databases, data pipelines, or machine learning in production.
• Docker and Kubernetes.
• Shipping something real with LLMs: prompt design, evaluation and improving output quality.

Before you apply

• Location. Tehran. We work mostly on-site, with the option of working remotely on some days, so this role is for people who live in or near Tehran and are happy to work from the office.
• Level. This is the senior role. If your experience so far is mostly building well-defined parts of projects that others designed and led, our Mid-Level Backend Engineer role is the better fit. Go by what you've actually done, not by your current title.

If most of this sounds like you, apply. You don't need to know every tool on day one, and if you want it, there's room here to grow into technical leadership.