Senior Backend Engineer (Analytics & AI)

Who are we?

Zencity is re-inventing the way governments listen to, understand, and interact with their residents. Our community trust platform uses advanced Natural Language Processing, ML algorithms and generative AI to help government organizations hear from more citizens, be more data-driven and increase resident satisfaction.

Zencity’s global team of urban enthusiasts and data geeks work with hundreds of cities and counties worldwide - from Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Tel Aviv. If you’re passionate about joining a growing company whose focus is on leveraging data and tech to radically improve life in communities - your place is with us!

What is the role?

As a Senior Backend Engineer on our Applied AI team, you will join our team in our Tel Aviv office. You will be in charge of developing great new features that help mayors and other city leaders understand their citizens and their cities more effectively, improving the lives of millions around the world. This includes working on all engineering parts of our AI efforts, from data integration and enrichment to service architecture and model deployment.

Day to Day

• Work as a key member of our Applied AI team and collaborate with other teams across the company on innovative new products and tools.
• Develop, test, and deploy new features and enhancements for our AI-driven platform.
• Build and manage robust data and modeling infrastructure to enable analytics and AI capabilities.
• Serve as the team’s expert on engineering practices and facilitate collaboration with other engineering leaders across the R&D organization.
• Optimize applications and services to ensure high performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Contribute to architectural decisions, improve development processes, and implement testing and monitoring as part of the team’s day-to-day workflow.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and emerging technologies, integrating them into the team’s work where applicable.
• Work an in-person or hybrid schedule, with at least 3 days per week in our Tel Aviv office.
  
  

• At least 6 years of experience in backend development and/or data engineering.
• Extensive experience with the Python ecosystem for data-intensive applications, including strong familiarity with common tooling, design patterns, and pitfalls.
• Solid understanding of cloud services, particularly AWS.
• Proven experience working with databases and data processing tools such as PostgreSQL, Databricks, Scala, and Spark.
• Proficiency with CI/CD tools and practices, containers, serverless architectures, and automated testing and monitoring.
• Experience with Agile development processes.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, delivery-driven environment in collaboration with diverse, international teams.
• Excellent command of English, both verbal and written.
  
  

• Designed and built a data-centric product or service from the ground up and deployed it to production.
• Experience building analytics, data science, machine learning, or AI tools / services or working as part of related teams.
• Experience deploying models to production using leading machine learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Experience working with social media or other high-volume, frequently-updated datasets.
• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent relevant experience.
• Contributions to open-source projects or active participation in the developer community.