Backend Engineer (Go)

About Artsem

Artsem is an AI shopping assistant for fashion, and we are hiring an experienced backend engineer to own Go services from the code to the Azure resources they run on. Shoppers search and chat in natural language (or by photo) across a catalogue of thousands of independent Shopify stores, on the web at artsem.ai and on iOS. Merchants connect their store, get discovered and see how shoppers find them.

The whole platform is in production and run by a small team.

What you will work on

You will own several of our six production Go services, not one corner of a monolith:

• AI search and chat (the shopper API). Natural-language queries go through intent parsing with Azure OpenAI, hybrid keyword + vector retrieval in Azure AI Search, and a streaming chat over WebSockets. Visual search by photo is the newest piece.
• Merchant platform. Store onboarding, Shopify install and usage billing, Stripe checkout, multi-store accounts on one login.
• Catalogue pipeline. A scraper that keeps tens of thousands of products from external Shopify stores fresh, and a batch job that enriches them with structured attributes using LLMs, under a hard cost cap.
• Analytics and admin. An event stream from every client into Event Hubs and Cosmos DB, an internal admin API, and an MCP server that lets AI agents query platform analytics.
• Lead capture. A phone-verified sign-up flow with an AI assistant over Twilio SMS.

Typical work: design an API contract with the frontend and iOS teams, ship it behind a test-user flag, measure it on production traffic, then roll it out. Cost and latency of every LLM call matter as much as correctness.

Our stack: Go, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB, Event Hubs, WebSockets, Stripe, Twilio, Shopify, MCP.

What we expect

• 3+ years of backend engineering, with 2+ years writing Go in production. You know contexts, goroutines and errors as values well.
• Solid SQL: schema design, migrations you can roll out safely, query plans. Comfort with a document store such as Cosmos DB or MongoDB.
• You have built and run HTTP and WebSocket APIs that real clients depend on: versioning, auth (JWT), idempotency, rate limits.
• Hands-on cloud experience, ideally Azure: containers, managed identities, secrets, logs. You can read a Terraform plan and say what it will change.
• You have shipped at least one feature built on an LLM API and measured its quality, latency and cost rather than eyeballing it.
• You write tests as part of the change, and you can debug production from logs and data without guessing.
• Working English for reading and reviewing tickets, pull requests and specs, and for writing design notes and async updates.

Nice to have

• Search relevance work: Azure AI Search, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, vector search, embeddings, offline evaluation sets.
• Shopify apps or Storefront API, Stripe billing, Twilio.
• Event pipelines and analytics: Event Hubs, Kafka or similar.
• Large batch jobs on paid APIs: throttling, retries, resumable runs, spend caps.
• E-commerce or fashion catalogue data.
• Using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor) as a daily tool. Our repos carry agent docs and skills, and we expect you to work with them.

How we work

• Small team, short path from idea to production. You talk directly to the people building the web, iOS and Shopify clients.
• Every repo has its own tests, deploy scripts and docs; production changes go through pull requests and CI.
• Decisions are made on data: eval sets for search quality, analytics for user behaviour, measured cost per request.
• No legacy rewrite project waiting for you. The code is modern Go, but you will find debt worth removing, and you are trusted to remove it.

What we offer

• Compensation: $2,000 per month
• Full-time position
• Working hours: 9−5

To apply

Send your CV or LinkedIn profile and a few lines about a backend system you built and what you would change in it today.