Backend Engineer, Database

About The Team

Adaptive ML is a frontier AI startup building a Reinforcement Learning Operations (RLOps) platform that enables enterprises to specialize and deploy LLMs into production with measurable impact. We provide the core infrastructure to tune, evaluate, and serve specialized models at scale, pioneering task‑specific LLM development and running production‑ready workflows that serve millions of requests while optimizing for cost and performance across distributed systems.

About The Role

As a Backend Engineer on our Product Team, you will help transform our technology into exceptional products. This in‑person role, based out of our Paris office, focuses on building and maintaining high‑availability data infrastructure, designing PostgreSQL systems for heavy transactional workloads, and architecting ClickHouse pipelines for large‑scale analytical queries. As an early member, you’ll shape the product team and collaborate with frontend and technical staff to deliver speed and correctness.

Your Responsibilities

• Design, iterate, and implement the backend data layer powering our products;
• Own the architecture and operation of high‑availability, high‑throughput PostgreSQL systems;
• Build and maintain ClickHouse pipelines for analytics and large‑scale event data at production scale;
• Develop high‑quality Rust software, with elevated standards of performance and robustness;
• Define systematic processes for data modeling, schema evolution, and reliability across our stack;
• Contribute to our product roadmap, aligning the needs of our Commercial Team with the latest advancements from our Technical Team;
• Report clearly on your work to a distributed collaborative team, with a bias for asynchronous written communication.

Ideal Background

• Significant experience in backend or infrastructure software development;
• Deep, hands‑on expertise with PostgreSQL at scale — replication, failover, connection pooling, query optimization, and schema design under high transactional load;
• Production experience with ClickHouse — ingestion pipelines, data modeling for analytical workloads, and performance tuning at scale;
• Strong software engineering skills, with a focus on robustness and performance;
• A track record of shipping ambitious technical products under tight deadlines;
• A deep concern for user experience, and how data infrastructure choices manifest in product quality;
• Passionate about the future of generative AI, and eager to build foundational technology to help machines deliver more singular experiences;
• Comfortable leveraging AI‑assisted programming tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) as part of an established personal workflow to ship faster and with greater confidence;
• Experience with observability tooling — monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) — is a plus.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical (health, dental, and vision) insurance for you and your dependents;
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching (or local equivalent);
• Unlimited PTO — we strongly encourage at least 5 weeks each year;
• Wellbeing and personal development stipends;
• Quarterly team offsites and frequent get‑togethers;
• Visa sponsorship if you wish to relocate to New York or Paris.