Founding Backend Engineer

London, UK
Salary: £150,000 - £160,000
Equity: 0.8% - 1.3%

In-person, with flexible remote days

European visa sponsorship available

About Aurora

Aurora is the Lifestyle Operating System empowering the world’s highest-performing individuals.

Consumer technology was supposed to give us leverage. To make it easier to find the right restaurant, the right trip, the right doctor.

Instead, every major platform today is optimised against the person using it: more scrolling, more ads, more engagement loops. You have infinite choice and zero clarity.

We exist to reverse that.

Aurora takes millions of data points about you and about the world and finds the one thing that is right for you, at the right time.

Our members — tier-1 founders, executives, and athletes — use Aurora to navigate travel, health, dining, experiences, and premium goods with the kind of judgment that used to require a team of people who'd known you for years.

Over half use it every single day, 95% every week, and in our first 6 months months, member spend is outperforming industry benchmarks by 5×.

Aurora is backed and chaired by Alex Macdonald, the most successful founder in this category, and has raised >$5M from experienced operators and tier-1 investors.

We are now expanding the founding engineering team as we scale the product and the member base.

Aurora is built in person from our offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles. The engineering team works primarily from our London office in Belgravia, with flexible remote days.

The role

We’re hiring a highly ambitious Founding Backend Engineer to work closely alongside our CTO and core engineering team to build and evolve Aurora’s backend systems.

You’ll work with the founders, product, and other engineers to design and implement the core infrastructure behind the product. This includes APIs, background processing, agent orchestration, and data pipelines that support proactive, AI-driven behavior.

This is a hands-on role with a high level of ownership. You’ll be responsible for taking features from idea to production and for keeping the system reliable as usage grows.

You’ll report directly to the CTO. Over time, your role can grow into a broader technical or leadership position as the company scales.

We ship high-polish, high-leverage products to our discerning customer base. We are urgent with our inputs and pragmatic with our outputs.

Many of our early team have ambitions to be founders in the future - we view Aurora as a high-performance startup academy, where you will personally drive the evolution of a high-growth product from its earliest stages.

Join us.

Requirements

What you’ll do

• Design and build backend services and APIs using Python and Django
• Own features end to end, from initial design to production rollout
• Maintain and evolve background processing, agent orchestration, and LLM integrations
• Work with context-heavy data pipelines and RAG-style systems
• Operate and improve cloud infrastructure on GCP
• Improve performance across SQL queries, background jobs, and API endpoints
• Debug production issues and lead incident resolution
• Implement secure coding practices and support compliance efforts
• Collaborate closely with product, curators, and frontend/mobile engineers
• Review code and help raise the overall technical bar

What we’re looking for

Experience

• 5+ years building and operating production backend systems
• Strong, hands-on experience with Python and Django

Backend fundamentals

• Deep familiarity with Django and DRF, including common pitfalls
• Strong SQL skills and experience with schema design and performance tuning
• Experience with background job systems (ideally Celery)
• Comfort designing reliable, observable systems
• Experience working with LLMs or AI infrastructure
• Exposure to agent-based systems or RAG pipelines

Infrastructure

• Experience running cloud-native systems, ideally on GCP
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform
• Experience operating services in production, not just building them

Product mindset

• You care about how systems are used, not just how they’re built
• You think in terms of reliability, latency, and failure modes
• You’re comfortable making trade-offs and explaining them clearly

Collaboration

• Able to work closely with product, design, and other engineers
• Clear communicator who takes ownership and follows things through
• A want to be in-person, near the customer

Nice to have

• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001)
• Basic understanding of frontend or mobile stacks (Flutter, Vue)

Benefits

1. $2,000 Tech & Education budget
2. Complimentary Oura ring or Whoop
3. Complimentary longevity testing subscription
4. Lifestyle perks, events, and access opportunities
5. Full health benefits; 90% coverage, including full dental & vision
6. Complimentary dinners and evening transport
7. 15 Flexible remote days per year