Backend Engineer

About the company

• ICEYE delivers space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to governments and allied nations.
• Leverages synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite technology and the world's largest SAR satellite constellation.
• Headquartered in Finland, operating globally with more than 900 employees.

Responsibilities

• Deploy ICEYE's intelligence platform into customer secure environments (on-premise, air-gapped networks, classified data centres).
• Install, upgrade and operate Kubernetes clusters and containerised applications (Docker) in customer environments.
• Build infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines that work without external internet access.
• Troubleshoot deployment and production issues in disconnected environments.
• Design and build APIs, services and data pipelines handling large volumes of SAR imagery and intelligence data with low latency.
• Connect ICEYE systems to customer C4ISR infrastructure and intelligence tools.
• Own database design and performance at production scale (PostgreSQL, MongoDB).
• Build monitoring, logging and alerting that work in restricted environments.
• Harden deployments to meet customer security constraints.
• Run the infrastructure behind AI workloads — model serving, vector databases, GPU nodes.
• Work embedded with intelligence analysts, operators and customer IT teams.
• Rapidly prototype and iterate to address immediate operational needs.
• Conduct hands-on training for customer administrators.

Requirements

• 5+ years hands-on backend engineering building and operating production systems at scale.
• Strong programming skills in Python (typed, tested services, async APIs). TypeScript is a plus.
• Proven experience designing high-performance backend systems: APIs, distributed services, messaging, caching and databases under real load.
• Production experience in both cloud (e.g., AWS) and on-premises environments.
• Deep Docker and Kubernetes: deploy, debug, and upgrade clusters. GitOps and infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Observability as a habit: metrics, logs, and alerts.
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD experience.
• PostgreSQL and/or MongoDB at production scale: schema design, tuning, replication, backup and recovery.
• Builder mindset: ship fast, iterate with feedback.
• Strong communication and customer engagement.
• Strong spoken and written English.
• Willingness to travel 40–60% to customer sites within the region.
• Nice to have: experience in defence, intelligence, or government operational environments.
• Nice to have: deploying to on-prem data centres and/or air-gapped networks.
• Nice to have: event streaming and high-throughput data systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Nice to have: deeper Kubernetes (operators, service mesh, multi-cluster).
• Nice to have: security hardening and accreditation experience.
• Nice to have: familiarity with geospatial data, satellite imagery, or remote sensing.
• Nice to have: experience running infrastructure for AI/LLM workloads.
• Nice to have: active use of AI-assisted development tools.

Conditions

• Location: Portugal (Lisbon).
• Department: Product.
• Reports to: VP, Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Working type: Hybrid (on-site at customer locations approx. 50% of time).
• Must be eligible and able to attain relevant national and NATO security clearances.
• Must be based in-country and native level speaker of the country you're deploying to.