fixed-term project engagement｜Lead Backend Engineer

[ ABOUT TENCHIJIN ] Tenchijin Inc. is a Tokyo-headquartered space-tech company and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) certified venture. Through its land-evaluation and analytics platform, Tenchijin COMPASS, the company fuses earth-observation satellite data, geospatial and environmental layers, IoT and ground-sensor feeds, and clients' operational data with proprietary AI to deliver multimodal analytics for utilities and infrastructure enterprises. Tenchijin's flagship water-infrastructure solution, KnoWaterleak, assesses pipeline deterioration and leak risk from space-derived insights and is used by a growing number of water utilities to prioritize inspection and investment, reduce non-revenue water, and extend asset life. [ ABOUT THE PROJECT ] The Global South Project is an 18-month initiative (October 2026 – March 2028) to design, build, and deploy a scalable, secure, AI-ready analytics platform tailored to utilities and infrastructure operators across Global South markets. The project adapts Tenchijin's satellite-data and GeoAI capabilities to regions facing aging or rapidly expanding infrastructure, constrained budgets, and limited field-inspection capacity — delivering risk assessment and decision-support tools that improve infrastructure management workflows. All positions are contract-based and fully remote, operating as one distributed, cross-border team with English as the working language. [ ROLE SUMMARY ] You will lead the design and implementation of the platform's backend: high-performance microservices, public and internal APIs, and the data-ingestion pipelines that move satellite imagery metadata, geospatial layers, IoT sensor streams, and utility operational records into the analytics engine. Speed, stability, and data integrity are your accountability — the platform's risk-assessment outputs are only as trustworthy as the pipelines you build. [ Reports To ] Senior Cloud Architect [ Project Language ] English (professional working proficiency or higher required) [ KEY RESPONSIBILITIES ] - Own the backend architecture: service decomposition, API contracts, data models, and inter-service communication patterns for the multi-tenant platform. - Design and build scalable ingestion pipelines for heterogeneous sources — satellite-derived datasets, GIS layers, IoT/telemetry feeds, and client operational data (asset registries, maintenance records) — with validation, lineage, and idempotency guarantees. - Implement high-throughput APIs (REST/GraphQL/gRPC) serving map layers, analytics results, and risk scores to frontend applications and client integrations. - Set and enforce engineering standards: code review discipline, testing strategy, performance budgets, and API versioning policy for the backend team. - Lead and mentor Backend Developers; break down the roadmap into well-scoped, parallelizable work across time zones. - Collaborate with the Lead GeoAI Engineer to productionize ML model outputs — serving predictions, batch scoring pipelines, and feature stores. - Ensure data integrity and tenant isolation at the application layer, in line with the security architecture. - Drive performance engineering: profiling, caching strategy, query optimization, and horizontal scaling for high-volume geospatial queries. [ WHAT WE OFFER ] - A central role in applying satellite data and AI to real infrastructure challenges, with measurable social and environmental impact in Global South markets. - Fully remote, cross-border collaboration with senior specialists across cloud, GeoAI, product, and design. - Competitive contractor compensation commensurate with experience and scope. - Direct exposure to earth-observation technology, including data ecosystems built with Japan's space agency (JAXA). Tenchijin Inc. is an equal-opportunity organization. We evaluate all applicants on qualifications and merit, without regard to nationality, race, religion, gender, age, or disability. TENCHIJIN INC. · GLOBAL SOUTH PROJECT

- 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with 2+ years leading engineers or owning a major system end-to-end. - Expert proficiency in at least one modern backend stack (Go, Python, Java/Kotlin, or Node.js/TypeScript) and strong SQL/NoSQL data-modeling skills. - Proven delivery of production microservices architectures with high-throughput data processing (streaming and batch — Kafka, Kinesis, Spark/Flink, or equivalent). - Deep experience designing robust, versioned APIs consumed by external clients. - Strong grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency, idempotency, backpressure, and failure handling. - Professional working proficiency in English.

- Experience with geospatial data engineering (PostGIS, tile servers, raster processing, STAC) or time-series/IoT platforms. - Experience in multi-tenant SaaS backends with per-tenant data isolation. - Familiarity with serving ML models in production. - Experience working in a cross-functional POD / squad delivery model.