10Pearls
Backend Architect
Islamabad, Pakistan - Full Time
Company Overview
10Pearls is an end-to-end digital technology services partner helping businesses utilize technology as a competitive advantage. We help our customers digitalize their existing business, build innovative new products, and augment their existing teams with high-performance team members. Our broad expertise in product management, user experience/design, cloud architecture, software development, data insights and intelligence, cybersecurity, emerging tech, and quality assurance ensures that we are delivering solutions that address business needs.
10Pearls is proud to have a diverse clientele including large enterprises, SMBs, and high-growth startups. We work with clients across industries, including healthcare/life sciences, education, energy, communications/media, financial services, and hi-tech. Our many long-term, successful partnerships are built upon trust, integrity, and successful delivery and execution.
Role
We are seeking a Backend Architect to lead the design and evolution of a next-generation AI-native platform (AIX), with a primary focus on the Ontology Layer (L3)—the semantic core of the system.
This role requires strong architectural ownership and hands-on expertise in building scalable, secure, and multi-tenant backend systems. The ideal candidate will define data models, API contracts, and cross-layer communication patterns while collaborating closely with product, architecture, and engineering teams in an onsite environment in Islamabad.
Responsibilities
Design and own backend architecture with a focus on scalability, reliability, fault tolerance and multi-tenant systems
Architect and implement the ontology layer, including PostgreSQL schema design (object types, relationships, properties, governance and policy entities) with optimized indexing and row-level security
Define and maintain API contracts using GraphQL or REST, ensuring secure tenant isolation, versioning and efficient data access patterns
Design and manage event-driven communication across system layers using Kafka or equivalent technologies
Develop and govern action workflows (e.g., propose → simulate → approve → execute) with strong auditability, rollback strategies and control mechanisms
Write reference implementations, review code, and establish engineering standards for performance, testing, observability and reliability.
Lead and mentor a team of backend engineers, conduct design reviews, and drive architectural decision-making
Define service-level objectives (SLOs), conduct load testing, and ensure high availability and system resilience.
Design and govern cloud-native deployment architectures, including networking, storage, scalability, and cost optimization strategies across environments (cloud, hybrid, or on‑prem).
Collaborate with AI/ML teams to define safe and controlled interaction patterns between the ontology layer, agents, and LLM-driven components.
Requirements
6–8 years of experience building production-grade backend systems with demonstrated architectural ownership.
Strong proficiency in Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, AsyncIO) or equivalent backend technologies
Deep expertise in PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimization, migrations, and row-level security.
Working understanding of how LLMs and AI agents interact with backend systems, including constraints, feedback loops, and data governance considerations.
Solid experience in API design (GraphQL or REST at scale)
Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar)
Proven experience designing multi-tenant systems or platform architectures
Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts (consistency, fault tolerance, observability)
Experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience with design documentation and architecture decision records.
Nice to Have:
Experience with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Rego, ABAC)
Exposure to AI/LLM-based systems or agent-driven platforms
Experience with air-gapped or on-premise deployments
Familiarity with audit logging or tamper-evident systems
Contributions to open-source backend or data platform projects
