Senior Backend Engineer

Title: Senior Backend Engineer
Start Date: ASAP
Location: Primarily remote (optional hybrid in NYC or Chicago)

COMPANY OVERVIEW
Areté Capital Partners is a boutique, special-situation advisory firm that provides independent fiduciary and stewardship services to companies experiencing significant growth pains, complex organizational change, or existential crisis. Our scope of work includes serving as Board Members, Interim C-Suite Management, Chief Restructuring Officer, and other operationally focused roles, where AI-driven tools and analytics play a pivotal role in optimizing turnarounds and mitigating risks. The Areté team combines decades of professional experience across a multitude of sectors and situations, advising businesses during periods of distress and transition.

OPPORTUNITY
As an early member of Areté’s newly formed Data & AI team, you will work closely with the Team Lead to build the function from the ground up and scale our client project delivery.

Our Data and AI strategy has three pillars: People (internal transformation), Projects (client solution delivery), and Product (SaaS development). You’ll primarily focus on the Projects pillar—leading client engagements that solve real business problems through data science and AI—while contributing to our product roadmap by abstracting reusable components from client work.

You’ll work on high-impact projects across the portfolio of Areté clients. Some projects include SKU rationalization, inventory optimization for retail and CPG clients, and price optimization for entertainment industry leaders. This remote-first role offers significant autonomy, direct client interaction, and the chance to shape both our technical direction and team culture as we grow.

RESPONSIBILITIES
The Senior Backend Engineer (Data/AI) plays a vital role in delivering transformative data and AI solutions to our clients. Your involvement in initiatives will include, but are not limited to:

Client Project Delivery (70%)

• Lead client projects from discovery through production deployment, owning the full technical lifecycle
• Interface directly with clients to understand business challenges and translate them into technical solutions
• Work directly with Areté’s consultants to bring technology to automate and optimize their process and work together to deliver client outcomes
• Design and build production-ready data science and AI solutions using Python, modern ML frameworks, and agentic AI (Pydantic AI)
• Travel to client sites (up to 40%) for onboarding, discovery workshops, and strategic engagements
• Ensure solutions deliver measurable business value and meet success criteria established during discovery

Product Development & Technical Assets (20%)

• Abstract reusable components and patterns from client work into our SaaS product platform
• Build and maintain scalable, modular codebases that can be deployed across multiple clients
• Develop data pipelines, ML models, and AI agents that become core product features
• Establish technical standards, best practices, and documentation for the growing team
• Contribute to architecture decisions and technical strategy for the Data & AI business unit

Team Development & Collaboration (10%)

• Work closely with the Data Team Lead in a highly collaborative, remote-first environment
• Eventually mentor and manage junior engineers as the team scales
• Participate in technical decision-making and help shape the team’s culture and processes
• Contribute to internal knowledge sharing and technical documentation

EXPERIENCE/QUALIFICATIONS
Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Data Science, or related field
• 5+ years of professional experience with Python in production environments
• Proven track record of deploying AI/ML models to production and solving real business problems
• Strong proficiency with the PyData stack: pandas/polars, scikit-learn, matplotlib
• Solid SQL skills for data querying and manipulation
• Experience with agentic AI frameworks (Pydantic AI preferred, or similar)
• Proficiency with Jupyter or Marimo notebooks for exploratory analysis and prototyping
• Strong GitHub skills and collaborative development practices
• Client-facing experience is non-negotiable – you must be comfortable presenting to and advising clients
• Practical, hands-on experience (not just academic or theoretical background)
• Willingness to travel

Nice to Have:

• Consulting or professional services background
• Startup experience (ideally a mix of both consulting and startup environments)
• Frontend or full-stack development skills for added versatility
• Experience with dbt for data transformation workflows
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Experience in retail, CPG, or entertainment/events industries
• Knowledge of additional ML frameworks (LangChain, TensorFlow, PyTorch)

Originally posted on Himalayas