Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Courted•New York, NY

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Courted is the leading AI-powered platform for real estate recruiting, retention, and market intelligence. We help brokerages and teams understand agent performance, recruit strategically, and retain top talent—all in one place. The real estate industry moves over $100B in annual commissions, and it's still powered by spreadsheets, cold calls, and guesswork. We're building at the intersection of machine learning and a massive industry that's just beginning to modernize. We're an early-stage, high-growth SaaS company shipping fast, working smart, and building transformative tools for the next generation of real estate leaders. The Role We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our high-octane team. You will be responsible for building reliable systems across our Django platform, owning features end-to-end—from data modeling and API design through deployment and monitoring. Our backend is the engine for Courted, ingesting data from dozens of sources, running AI-powered analytics, and serving a growing API surface that delivers real-time market intelligence to thousands of real estate professionals. Applicants should have a background in building and maintaining production systems at scale, strong opinions on API design, a bias toward simplicity, and a genuine excitement for shipping meaningful features quickly. You'll contribute to architectural decisions as we scale and help mentor other engineers while pushing the boundaries of what the real estate industry thought was possible. What We Do We've built the most comprehensive real estate dataset in the country, covering over 95% of all US real estate geographies and spanning 20+ years of historical transactions, agent performance, and market intelligence—a dataset unmatched by any competitor. This proprietary data powers our predictive analytics, AI-driven outreach, and retention tools, providing brokerages with real insight into agent trajectories rather than relying on gut instinct. Our solution helps customers shift from a reactive stance to a proactive strategy in growing their business. The core of our platform presents a significant technical challenge. Our system includes a sophisticated Django REST API to serve complex analytics, Celery pipelines that process millions of records daily, and robust integrations with AI providers and various third-party platforms. If you are passionate about building clean, performant backend systems and seek an environment where engineering excellence is fundamental to the product's success, you will find this role rewarding. Our user base demands sub-second responses and bulletproof accuracy, requiring engineers who thrive on meeting high standards of performance and reliability.

Requirements

At least 5 years of full-time backend engineering experience, primarily in Python
Strong expertise in Django and Django REST Framework—you know the ORM deeply and can write efficient, well-structured APIs
Solid experience with PostgreSQL, including query optimization, indexing strategies, and migrations
Hands-on experience with task queues (Celery, or similar) and Redis for caching and async workloads
Comfort working with AWS services in production (ECS, RDS, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, or similar)
Extremely comfortable using AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI/LLM integrations (OpenAI API, prompt engineering, embedding workflows)
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), Docker, and CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI or similar)
Experience with observability tooling (DataDog, or similar) for tracing, logging, and performance monitoring
Strong experience working in agile teams, ideally within a SaaS or fast-paced startup environment
Curious and proactive mindset—you ask questions, seek context, and quickly learn new tools or technologies to get the job done
Strong end-to-end engineering process—from identifying the right problems to solve, to exploring solutions, and making smart tradeoffs along the way
Organized executor—you manage your time well, communicate clearly, and follow through to deliver thoughtful, high-quality work

Responsibilities

Design and build API endpoints, background jobs, and data models that power our core product—agent search, market intelligence, notifications, and AI features
Own features end-to-end: data modeling, serialization, permissions, caching, testing, deployment, and monitoring
Optimize query performance across a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database handling millions of real estate records
Build and maintain integrations with external services—OpenAI, HubSpot, Twilio, and real estate data providers
Develop and improve Celery task pipelines for scheduled reports, data syncs, and async processing
Contribute to infrastructure decisions as we scale—caching strategies, database optimization, and service architecture
Collaborate closely with frontend, data, product, and design teams to ship features that solve real user problems
Mentor junior engineers through code review, pairing, and architectural guidance