Backend Engineer, Product

About this role

ABOUT MIDJOURNEY

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species. We are a small, self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI.

We’re more than just a generation engine. We support a growing product ecosystem that includes profiles, moodboards, folder management, style galleries, subscriptions, and more.

We're looking for a backend engineer to build the systems behind those products.

You'll work closely with product, design, and frontend engineers from the earliest stages of a project, designing the data models, services, and APIs that power our products. This isn't GPU orchestration or distributed systems infrastructure—it's the product layer, and it has to be correct.

Sharing sounds like a frontend feature, but underneath it's a permissions and privacy problem. Billing looks simple until millions of subscriptions depend on it. You'll help make sure the decisions made in a product conversation still hold up in production, and that the systems behind those conversations remain simple years later.

We care more about what you have built than where you have built it. Great people at Midjourney have started in high school just as often as they have come from notable companies and universities. If you feel like you've got most of the skills we're looking for, but are worried that it might not be enough, reach out anyway. Let's chat.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

- Work with product, design, and frontend engineers from concept onward, owning the backend of user-facing features end to end.

- Design and build the systems behind features like sharing, profiles, moodboards, style galleries, and subscriptions, where privacy and data integrity are central to the product.

- Design and own the APIs that power our web, mobile, Discord, and public integrations.

- Build account and billing systems, including subscriptions, entitlements, usage accounting, data export, and deletion.

- Design schemas, evolve them safely under live traffic, and ship work that reaches millions of people within days.

YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF:

- You've built backend systems that power consumer products at scale.

- You have strong instincts for API design and data modeling, and prefer getting the model right before writing the code.

- You have deep experience with relational databases, especially Postgres, including schema design, indexing, query performance, and live migrations.

- You think of permissions, privacy, and access control as product problems, not just technical ones.

- You enjoy working closely with product, design, and frontend engineers from the earliest stages of a project.

- AI tools are part of your development workflow, and you're always looking for better ways to build software.

- You communicate clearly and work well across disciplines.

- You care about the people around you as much as the code. Great engineering teams make each other better.

NICE TO HAVE:

- Sharing, social graph, or permission systems that grew from prototype to scale.

- Billing or subscription systems (Stripe or similar), or public/partner API design.

- Privacy and compliance-facing work: data export, deletion, retention.

WHY MIDJOURNEY:

- Speed of a startup, freedom and resources of a research lab. No investors, no quarterly reporting cycle, no committees deciding the roadmap.

- Tiny team, large ambitions. Decisions show up in production within days, in front of one of the largest creative communities in the world.

LOGISTICS:

- Full-time. Hybrid: San Francisco

- Compensation: $175,000–$200,000 + benefits.

TO APPLY:

Share your resume. We care much more about what you've made than where you've worked, though; if this sounds like you, apply even if you don't check every box.

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