Backend Engineer (Rust / LLM Workflows / Infrastructure)

Join us in building digital tools that empower citizens and strengthen democracy.

We’re a mission-driven team developing technology to support participatory democracy at local, regional, and national levels. Our platform helps governments and communities co-create policies, run deliberative processes, and make collective decisions in a transparent, inclusive way.

We are recent graduates of the CivTech program, where we partnered with the Scottish Government to develop a new participatory democracy platform aimed at improving public engagement in policy making. In this role, you’ll contribute to building and refining that platform, tailoring it for other clients, and supporting bespoke projects based on client needs.

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer who’s excited about working with Rust, building robust APIs, and integrating LLM-powered workflows to support sense-making and large-scale deliberation.

What you will do

• Design and implement backend systems and APIs in Rust, using modern, secure best practices

• Set up and optimize LLM-driven workflows to support structured deliberation and semantic processing of citizen input

• Help architect, build, and maintain our core infrastructure

• Collaborate with frontend engineers, designers, and policy experts to ensure smooth end-to-end product development

• Support scalability, performance, and maintainability of our systems

What we are looking for

• Strong experience building backend services with Rust

• Comfort working with APIs, authentication systems, and distributed architectures

• Experience integrating or orchestrating LLM-based tools or pipelines

• Familiarity with modern development workflows, Git, and CI/CD

• Passion for civic tech, social impact, and designing systems that put users first

Bonus points

• Experience with the Axum web framework

• Experience deploying and managing infrastructure with Kubernetes

• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana)

• Prior work on systems involving data processing, machine learning, or natural language understanding