Backend Engineer (Python)

About Shelf

The enterprise is going agentic and we are creating a unique operating system for an automated future.

Most AI agents break the moment they hit real business complexity. That’s why we built a platform that models a company's policies, workflows, and operational logic into an AI Data Model. Shelf enables AI Agents to reliably reason and deliver precise and reliable outcomes at scale.

We already have what most AI startups are still trying to earn: Enterprise customers such as Glovo, Nespresso, and HelloFresh, real production data, and tens of thousands of users. Customers trust us with operational knowledge: Our platform is highly reliable and secure with SOC2, HIPAA-ready security practices, and mature integrations in place.

Location – Warsaw, work from the office.

About the Role

This role is for Middle and Senior backend engineers who can design and own business-critical systems.

We want someone who is strong technically, communicates clearly, and has the judgment to make systems simpler, safer, and easier to evolve over time. Expect real ownership from system design through production.

The team is small enough for engineers to make real decisions. Career growth comes from ownership. Titles matter less than the scope you can carry. The people who grow fastest take responsibility for larger systems, drive customer outcomes, and strive to develop better engineering practices.

You solve ambiguous problems by shaping the right architectural approach, then ship, iterate, and keep it healthy in production.

We build AI-native. Engineers use Codex, Claude Code, and agents they build themselves. We invest in harness engineering through skills, CLIs, logs, traces, and orchestration.

This is a role for someone in a high-growth chapter of their career, who wants to do the best work of their life, learn fast, and win as part of a team going all-in on a hard mission.

What Strong Performance Looks Like

• You reliably move important backend work forward without waiting to be tightly managed.
• Your systems are easier to operate and easier to change because of your design decisions.
• You make smart trade-offs to unblock shipping—and you stand by those decisions.
• You keep raising the bar on engineering excellence for yourself and everyone else.

How We Evaluate Fit

We care more about ownership, systems judgment, and learning velocity than a perfect keyword match to our stack. If you are the kind of engineer who can take a messy problem and turn it into a strong production system, we want to talk.

What Shelf Offers:

• B2B contract
• Company Stock Options
• Hardware: MacBook Pro
• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software
• A strong AI-native engineering environment with modern tools and room to experiment, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot

Why Shelf

• Becoming one of the defining companies of the AI age is a hard plan, and our leadership team has the rare mix of deep AI, knowledge-management, and enterprise SaaS experience to actually execute it
• We have raised over $60 million in funding; our investors include Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Base10, and others
• Recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, with high-velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category
• We love our customers and our customers love us. Ask a Shelf customer why, and they'll tell you it's our innovative capabilities and rock-solid reliability, that they enjoy working with our people, and most of all, the improvements they see in their business KPIs
• We're building fast across three hubs: our New York HQ and our Product and Engineering centers in Warsaw and Lviv