Lead Backend Engineer (Security) in Barcelona

📍 Barcelona office. Open to hybrid work. 
🛠 Full-time | Founding Engineer Track

🚀 Your Role at Alinia 

As Alinia’s Lead Backend Engineer, you will play a foundational role in building and securing the infrastructure that underpins our AI guardrails and compliance platform. You will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining robust, scalable, and privacy-first backend systems — ensuring our enterprise customers in finance and other regulated industries can safely deploy generative AI in compliance with the highest security standards.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role for someone who thrives in a fast-paced startup, has a strong engineering foundation, deep awareness of data privacy and compliance requirements, and the ability to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams.

At Alinia, you’ll play a key role in scaling the company and setting the bar for technical excellence, velocity, and trust.

🔧 Role Overview and Responsibilities

As lead backend engineer, you will be responsible for:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

● Set and lead the implementation of the technical roadmap aligned with Product Strategy in partnership with leadership.
● Own core architectural decisions across the platform to ensure robust, scalable, and high-performance backend systems.
● Lead the implementation of robust, scalable, secure cloud infrastructure.
● Mentor junior engineers and manage the day-to-day activities of the backend development team.
● Overview monitoring, alerting, and robust CI/CD pipelines.

Cross-functional Collaboration

● Work with product, research, design and compliance experts on product development to deliver a cohesive user experience.
● Support sales calls, demos, and technical evaluations.
● Partner with customers’ security and compliance teams during pilots and deployments.

Security & Privacy Engineering

● Ensure data security, integrity, and overall system performance.
● Build backend systems aligned with SOC 2, ISO 42001, GDPR, and the EU AI Act.
● Implement encryption, access controls, audit logs, and other privacy-by-design safeguards.
● Regularly test for vulnerabilities and drive security hardening.
● Ensure compliance with data residency and VPC/on-prem requirements for enterprise clients.

Team & Culture

● Help hire and onboard a high-performing, cross-functional engineering team.
● Help define and instill engineering processes and best practices.

Vendors and Budget Management

● Manage relationships with key technical vendors, partners, and cloud providers.
● Optimize compute and cloud spend and technical tooling; evaluate and secure credits where possible. (e.g., AWS, GCP, Modal).

🧠 What You Bring 

Minimum Qualifications

● 5+ years of relevant experience with 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership role.
● Experience deploying or working with LLMs or platforms.
● Strong understanding and previous experience with data security and privacy practices (encryption, IAM, logging, privacy-by-design) and compliance in an enterprise SaaS context.
● Understanding and prior experience implementing compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO/IEC 42001, GDPR, ISO 27001).
● Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and modern backend/frontend stacks (Python, Svelte/React).
● Excellent communication and collaboration skills; able to translate complex technical ideas for varied audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

● Strong product sense and a user-first mindset.
● Startup 0-to-1 experience and ability to embrace ambiguity.
● Experience with distributed systems and high performing systems.
● Experience supporting VPC or on-prem enterprise deployments.
● Experience working with or integrating LLM inference pipelines.
● Ability to thrive in customer-facing roles: sales support, success engineering, PoCs.
● Background in regulated industries (finance, insurance, healthcare).

Why Join Alinia

● Build and maintain backend systems that enable safe and compliant AI adoption.
● Early, high-impact role in a mission-driven AI governance startup.
● Work on problems at the intersection of AI, compliance, and enterprise software.
● Competitive compensation + meaningful equity.

🎯 What We Offer 

● Equity: Competitive equity package to share in our success.
● Growth: Opportunities for professional growth and career advancement.
● Innovation: Work on cutting-edge AI products that are transforming industries.
● Culture: Collaborative, inclusive, and dynamic startup culture.
● Impact: Make a significant impact on the direction and success of our products.

Alinia’s Mission

We are an early-stage AI startup on a mission to help organizations deploy generative AI applications safely, responsibly, and at scale. If you’re excited about building foundational infrastructure for enterprise-grade GenAI, and thrive in fast-moving, high-ownership environments, we’d love to hear from you. Our platform and API ensure organizations can deploy LLMs in a secure, controlled, and auditable way. We’re creating the most trustworthy foundation for AI in the enterprise — where governance, alignment, and compliance are built-in from day one.