Senior Backend Engineer (Hybrid – Cape Town, South Africa)

Engineering – Full-time / Permanent

Timbuk2 AI is a geospatial and AI-driven analytics company helping enterprises in emerging markets make smarter, location-based decisions. We blend socio-economic, cellular, and generative AI insights to help retailers, real estate firms, and advertisers understand how people move, spend, and behave—enabling them to invest wisely and grow sustainably.

We’re building an AI-powered insights platform that delivers actionable intelligence at scale, and we’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help us architect and scale the systems behind it.

This is an opportunity to join an ambitious early-stage team, work across high-impact data products, and contribute to cutting-edge AI workflows. If you're excited about building infrastructure for high-volume, geo-aware, data-rich applications—this is your place.

An Opportunity to Build Scalable Backend Infrastructure

• Architect and scale the core backend systems that power Timbuk2 AI’s data-driven insights engine.

• Build and maintain data ingestion pipelines that integrate geospatial, socio-economic, and behavioral data from multiple sources.

• Design and implement robust APIs used by both internal services and external clients.

• Contribute to and improve cloud infrastructure and DevOps workflows using IaC, container orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Collaborate with data scientists to integrate AI/LLM-driven workflows into production systems.

• Solve complex problems around multi-tenancy, deployment flexibility, and scale as we expand to new regions.

About You

• 5+ years of experience building scalable backend systems in Python, .NET, or Node.js (we primarily use Python and .NET).

• Experience working with cloud-native infrastructure, ideally on AWS, but cloud-agnostic experience (Azure, GCP) is also valuable.

• Proficient in designing RESTful APIs, working with PostgreSQL, and handling asynchronous processing with tools like SQS, RabbitMQ or Kafka.

• Comfortable with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CDK) and CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions.

• Familiarity with data engineering and AI/ML pipelines is a plus.

• You’re pragmatic, love automating things, and bring a “clean code and clean deployments” mentality.

• Bonus: Experience with geospatial data, serverless architecture, or distributed systems.

Our Stack Today

• Python, .NET, and Node.js (primarily Python for data workflows and .NET for APIs)

• PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis

• AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudFront, ECS, Step Functions, Bedrock)

• EF Core, FastAPI, Pandas, LangChain

• Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker, CloudWatch, Athena

• We're integrating LLMs into workflows using serverless architectures

Why Join Timbuk2 AI?

• Impact – Be part of building something from the ground up with real-world influence on investment, mobility, and infrastructure in emerging markets.

• Ownership – You'll have the autonomy to shape architecture, tools, and technical decisions.

• Growth – Help scale an early-stage product and define how it grows across regions and clients.

• Culture – We value trust, pragmatism, and collaboration. We work hard, ship fast, and support each other.

• Hybrid Flexibility – Our team is based in Cape Town, with a hybrid work policy. Offices are in Green Point, with in-office days for collaboration and planning.

Sound like you? Let’s build the future of geospatial intelligence together. Apply now or get in touch to learn more. 🚀