Staff Backend Engineer - Moderation

Our team is building a new product within Cloudinary, focused on large scale visual moderation.

It is a fast moving, high impact effort that is already attracting interest from major customers.

We operate like a small startup inside Cloudinary, which means:

Full independence in technical and product decisions.

Freedom to build things the way we want.

The backing and stability of a well established, successful company.

Strong people first culture with genuinely great teammates.

We own the full development lifecycle, from deciding what to build to how we build, ship, and operate it. The team is very small, highly focused, and fully hands on.

You will work on a backend system where scale, cost, and correctness all matter at the same time.

You will have real architectural ownership, direct customer impact, and the freedom to move fast without heavy process.

Few roles offer this combination inside a mature company.

What You Will Do
Own the Server Side
Design, build, and evolve the server side of a moderation platform operating at scale, including:

High throughput async pipelines.

Large volumes of images and videos.

Multi tenant systems.

Cost sensitive ML workloads.

Agentic moderation workflows and AI-driven decision systems.

Ship Fast, Ship Smart.

Deliver value iteratively with a clear focus on customer and business impact.

Move quickly without losing sight of long term architecture and operational quality.

Set the Technical Foundation

Make architectural decisions that scale over time.

Use agentic development and code generation to accelerate delivery, while keeping engineering judgment, technical accountability, and code ownership firmly in human hands.

Elevate Quality and Standards
Build clean, modular, secure backend systems that are meant to live and evolve.

Establish good engineering practices around testing, observability, reliability, and maintainability.

Drive Innovation and Practicality
Explore new ideas and approaches, but always ground them in real world constraints like latency, cost, and operational complexity.