Backend & Integration Engineer

We're not retrofitting old systems. We're building something that has never existed before — a continuous intelligence layer for the livestock industry, processing millions of sensor events per day and turning them into real-time insights that change how farms operate. We're at day one of the software journey. This is your chance to architect it.

THE COMPANY

Milkline has spent 50 years at the core of the dairy industry. Our team has been a driving force in the major steps of the connected animal revolution — contributing to how the industry thinks about process quality, animal health, and data-driven farm management.

Now we're launching a new venture that applies continuous IoT sensing, advanced proprietary algorithms, and AI-native interfaces to transform how livestock health and performance are understood — in real time, at scale, at the animal level.

The science is validated. The hardware is field-proven. We're now building the platform.

THE ROLE

You will design and own the cloud data infrastructure from scratch — from raw sensor ingestion to advanced proprietary algorithm operationalization, from multi-tenant SaaS architecture to LLM-powered agentic interfaces.

One installation generates hundreds of thousands of events per day. At 12-month scale: tens of millions per month. At 4-year scale: billions. The decisions you make in month one need to be right — simple to ship, impossible to outgrow.

You'll work directly with the CTO, with full ownership of backend architecture, third-party integrations, and operational reliability.

The hardware is field-validated and the science is proven — built by a team that knows this industry inside out. Now we're assembling the software team that will take it to market and scale it globally. You'll be among the first to join, with a direct line to the CTO and a hand in shaping who comes next.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

→ 5–10 years of backend engineering — you've shipped systems that ran at scale and survived real traffic, not just passed code review

→ Python at production level — you know the difference between a notebook and a service, and you've built the latter under pressure

→ Cloud-native on Azure (or AWS/GCP equivalent) — serverless, managed services, event-driven patterns; you don't manage servers you don't have to

→ Data pipeline experience — streaming or batch, IoT or sensor data, you've dealt with high-frequency ingestion and know what breaks first

→ API design — clean contracts, versioning, multi-stakeholder access patterns; you've been on both sides of a bad API and learned from it

→ LLM API integration — you've connected external AI APIs to production systems and know how to build a provider-agnostic abstraction layer

→ Security and data isolation — multi-tenant by design, not by patch

→ English fluency is mandatory — it is the working language of the team, the codebase, and the product; Italian is a plus

NICE TO HAVE

→ Modern data storage patterns — Azure Data Explorer, Delta Lake, or similar; you know when a relational DB is enough and when it isn't

→ Experience deploying or serving open-source LLMs (Llama, Mistral) in production environments

→ AgTech, livestock tech, precision farming, or industrial IoT — domain knowledge accelerates everything here

HOW WE WORK

Location: North Italy HQ — hybrid

Remote: Flexible after an initial period. Strong on-site presence required for the first 6–8 months — we're building something complex and the early phase demands close collaboration, domain immersion, and shared decision-making.

Language: English mandatory · Italian a plus

Compensation: Competitive, commensurate with seniority

Start date: Immediate, or compatible to the candidate’s contractual notice period