Backend & Data Engineer — Multimodal AI Platform - Freelance

**Location:** Fully remote (Canada) **Duration:** Milestone-based freelance contract **Overview** A large-scale organization is building a next-generation multimodal AI platform to process vast volumes of imagery, video, and audio. The platform will perform automated first-pass analysis using computer vision, speech-to-text, and language models, then route findings to human experts for review and validation. This is a software architecture, integration, and data-engineering effort that assembles best-in-class existing AI services into a robust, vendor-agnostic, API-first production platform designed to scale into the petabytes. The role focuses on building the ingestion pipeline and data backbone that manages original media, AI-generated metadata, human-validated results, and full traceability. **Key Responsibilities** - Build a media ingestion pipeline handling multiple imagery, video, and audio formats - Design and implement a repository for original media, AI and operator-validated metadata, contextual data, workflow status, and evaluation results with end-to-end traceability - Architect a system for serious scale supporting hundreds of terabytes growing into petabytes, tens of millions of managed objects, and heavy daily search load - Develop documented REST APIs across every major capability - Implement fast, reliable search and retrieval functionality **Required Qualifications** - 6+ years in backend/data engineering with production ownership of large systems - Demonstrated delivery of data platforms and object/blob storage at multi-hundred-terabyte-or-larger scale with specific examples of systems and scale operated - Strong REST API design and implementation experience - Hands-on experience with search/retrieval technologies (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, vector stores) and metadata management at scale - Prior delivery of systems of comparable scale and complexity, with references or portfolio - Based in Canada and able to contract as an independent professional **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience with media/broadcast formats (MXF, HEVC/AVC, XDCAM) and large-file handling - Experience with cloud data platforms and orchestration tooling (Kafka, Airflow, Spark) - Knowledge of data governance, lineage, and cataloging - Experience delivering complex software systems for government or regulated industries **Work Location & Requirements** - Fully remote position - Must be based in Canada - Independent contractor engagement (not employment) - Selection process includes review of background and past work, followed by a short technical assessment/coding exercise