Senior Backend and AI Engineer

This is a contractor role through X-Team supporting one of the world's largest media and information services companies. You will join a newsroom transformation team, working at the core of a global content system to build intelligent retrieval and reasoning on top of a very large archive of journalism. You will design and build AI-powered search and discovery experiences using multi-modal retrieval and agentic workflows. The role is heavily backend focused: Python-based AI systems alongside scalable Node.js services delivering production-grade APIs. Day to day this includes LLM orchestration with LangChain, retrieval augmented generation grounded in trusted news content, model fine-tuning support in Python, and observability across the AI stack. You will act as the interface between the European backend team and stakeholders in the US, UK and Australia.

Must have

• 7+ years in backend or distributed systems engineering.
• Strong Node.js, TypeScript and Express.js, with at least basic Python.
• Hands-on experience with AI orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph or OpenAI AgentKit, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning and RAG architectures.
• Docker and CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI).
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Experience designing scalable APIs and microservices for complex data systems.
• Deep understanding of AWS or another major cloud provider (the client prefers Google Cloud).
• Strong communication skills and experience collaborating across multiple engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Media, publishing or newsroom technology experience, especially large-scale content or digital journalism environments.
• Familiarity with legacy systems (PHP) and migration work.
• Startup or fast-paced product experience, including go-to-market exposure.
• Experience with globally distributed teams across time zones.

Who does well here

• Strong ownership mindset, able to drive work independently in ambiguous environments.
• Clear communicator with global technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative and team first across distributed engineering teams.
• Proactive and solutions oriented, anticipating issues and proposing improvements.
• Comfortable in fast-moving, AI-driven product environments