Location: Barcelona (Esplugues de Llobregat) | Employment Type: Full-Time

About Us

At KOA Biotech, we’re a young and ambitious biotech startup on a mission to make aquaculture smarter, safer, and more sustainable. We develop cutting-edge technology that combines biotech, IoT, and AI to provide continuous pathogen surveillance directly at the farm, helping producers make informed decisions and boost their productivity.

We are a multidisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and innovators working side by side to turn complex challenges into meaningful impact. We live where biology meets technology, building the systems, software, and infrastructure that make science faster, smarter, and ready for the real world.

If you enjoy working on diverse problems, taking ownership, and building tools that make a real difference, you’ll feel at home with us.

The Role

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer who’s passionate about creating elegant, high-impact software and is excited to work across a variety of problems. You’ll take a leading role in building and maintaining the backend code that powers our platforms, improving scalability, security, and reliability.

While your main focus will be backend engineering, you’ll also have opportunities to expand your scope and contribute to areas such as data architecture, infrastructure management, or machine learning operations. You’ll work closely with engineers, data scientists, and biotech teams to turn ideas into production-ready solutions and continuously improve how our technology operates in the field.

You’ll be joining a small, fast-moving environment where ideas quickly become reality and where your contributions have a direct impact on how innovative biotech solutions reach the field.

Things You’ll Work On

• Strengthen the underlying system that powers our web apps by expanding SQL data models, exposing new FastAPI endpoints, and integrating secure authentication through Keycloak to ensure data flows reliably and safely from backend to frontend.

• Contribute to backend scalability by implementing and maintaining distributed job-queue systems (e.g., Celery) for asynchronous processing.

• Define and implement standards for QA, testing, and performance monitoring.

• Support deployment workflows using Docker and GitHub Actions + CI/CD pipelines on Google Cloud.

• Collaborate with data scientists to strengthen AI workflows, integrating Google Cloud Storage, SQL databases, and computer vision tools, and bringing predictions and performance insights.

Who You Are

• A critical thinker and engineer who enjoys understanding how things work end to end.

• Bring around 2–4 years of experience developing and maintaining modern backend systems.

• Have solid foundations in Python, TypeScript, and SQL, and are able to apply these tools effectively in real-world systems.

• Understands trade-offs in technical decisions and is able to make well-informed decisions and prioritize work.

• A curious and proactive builder who loves to learn and explore new areas, with the ambition to grow within the company.

What We Offer

• Meaningful work: your code directly impacts sustainability and aquaculture health.

• Ownership and autonomy: help define how our software and systems evolve as we scale.

• Hybrid work setup: work from home up to two days per week, with flexibility around your schedule.

• Professional growth: opportunities to explore new technologies and take on greater responsibility as the company grows.

• Comfortable workspace: modern office with access to a subsidised gym and on-site cafeteria, and padel courts.

• Competitive salary aligned with your experience and growth potential.