(Senior) Python Backend Engineer

Help us decarbonize the cement and concrete industry.

alcemy was founded to reduce the massive CO2 footprint of the cement and concrete industry. Concrete is humanity's second most used material by volume and its production is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions.

We are changing this! We leverage machine learning to provide smart production control software to the cement and concrete supply chain to improve efficiency and allow for the production of low-carbon cement and concrete at large scale. Our software is used 24/7 in cement and concrete plants to optimize production and reduce carbon emissions today. We are currently enabling our customers to save more than 100 000 tons of CO2 emissions each year and we aim to save 100 million tons per year in 2030.

The Opportunity

• You will be joining our cement app team as a senior software engineer, where you will play a key role in developing one of our core products.
• Take joint responsibility for our backend code base, contribute to architectural decisions, and uphold rigorous software quality standards.
• Join us in our mission to expand our reach globally by creating innovative features and enhancing the efficiency of our current application.
• We’re a small start-up, so you’ll also have the opportunity to explore and work on other areas. For example, one of our front-end engineers recently took the responsibility for moving our web app deployment over to Kubernetes.

Within 1 month, you will...

• Complete our onboarding and get guided through our development and CI/CD process.
• Clone your personal copy of our entire production tech stack in our AWS cloud, including front-end, back-end, and the machine learning pipeline. You can poke and dismantle it to your own liking.
• You will inevitably learn a lot about concrete production and the intricacies of concrete data.
• Deploy your first code to production.

Within 3 months, you will...

• Take co-ownership of the back-end of our web application.
• Know your way around our back-end tech stack.
• Implement and ship your first major feature.

Within 6 months, you will...

• You have fully taken co-ownership of our web application and have become a valued member in determining the future of our application including:
• responsibility for estimating the time and technical scope of new major features as well as their implementation,
• collaborating with our product owners and machine learning team on our roadmap,
• shaping our tech stack and how we work together as a team.

• You care about climate change.
• You are a strong Python developer with ≥ 2 years of experience, ideally in developing and testing data-focused applications.
• You have experience building production-ready APIs and back-end software using Django, Flask, or ideally FastAPI.
• You know how to write SQL and have experience working with PostgreSQL.
• You are excited by working with data-intensive applications.

• A company culture where honesty, professionalism, and integrity run deep with an open feedback culture and regular 1:1 meetings.
• Flat hierarchies, efficient decision-making processes, and an agile company structure.
• Competitive market-rate salary aligned with your experience, within the budget of €80-95k.
• VSOP equity options vested equally over 4 years.
• Work fully remotely within Germany or from our office in the heart of Berlin with flexible working hours (part-time is possible).
• Of course, free drinks, fruit and snacks in the office.
• Regular team activities and team weeks a few times per year.
• Mac or Linux laptop of your choice.
• Budget for personal and professional development - 1500€/year & 3 days/quarter.
• Access to nilo.health - the comprehensive mental well-being platform that provides access to 1-to-1 sessions with psychologists, group sessions and self-guided tools.
• English is our main language of communication.
• 28 days of vacation per year and an additional day of vacation every 2 years at alcemy.

Working at alcemy

• We highly prize transparency and welcome direct feedback. We are constantly open to finding new ways to collaborate and improve the way we work together.
• Engineers take ownership of their features from implementation, testing through code reviews, and deployment.
• No engineer is on-call.
• We’ve been working hard to get a defined career progression framework in place, charting out both technical expert & management tracks.
• We are passionate about helping our customers and always approach them and each other in a supportive and appreciative way.

Tech Stack

• Python for everything in our back-end. Our RESTful APIs are built using FastAPI with auto-generated Swagger UI documentation and OpenAPI schema. Our database schema is defined using SQLAlchemy and our data models using pydantic. We test our code using pytest and write modern, type-hinted Python checked with mypy. Number crunching and analyses are done using pandas, numpy and sklearn.
• We store our data in PostgreSQL and our infrastructure runs on AWS using Kubernetes.
• We use React & Next.js for building our front-ends. Everything is written in TypeScript. We use Blueprint.js as our component library and layout our application using TailwindCSS. Our RESTful API is integrated using RTK Query and any shared state is managed using Redux via Redux Toolkit.

Hiring Process

Our hiring process is fully remote and we’ll communicate with you over email and video chat.

• Initial 1:1 screening call (30 minutes) with one of our team members
• Complete a take-home task relevant to the actual work you’d be doing
• A technical interview (60 minutes) with 2 of our engineers
• A team fit interview (45 minutes) with 2 of your future team members
• Reference check - we contact two references you provide (e.g. former work colleagues)
• Decision

We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply. We also acknowledge how stressful interviews can be. Let us know if there is anything we can do to improve the process so you can demonstrate your skill set.

Note: We currently do not offer visa sponsorships, so you need to already have a valid work visa for the EU in order to apply.