Title: Backend Engineer Department: Product & Engineering Division — Code Development Reports to: Jordan Calloway — Director of Product & Engineering

About

Priya owns the Python / FastAPI layer that powers Patriot University’s server-side intelligence. The backend is deployed on a cPanel shared host under Passenger/lswsgi and exposes the core AI capabilities: the constitutional rights advisor (Claude via the Anthropic API), the investigation workflow composer (/investigate/workflow), entity lookup (/investigate/entity-lookup), and tool recommender (/investigate/tool-recommend), as well as hybrid search endpoints for the research corpus (/research/search) and speech archive (/speeches/search). Priya works across the full app/ directory — routes, services, skills index, Tier 2 API integrations (OpenSanctions, OpenCorporates, HIBP, Shodan) — and owns the passenger_wsgi.py entry point, the index_cache.pkl startup artifact, and the requirements.txt dependency manifest. She applies the Zero-PII architecture principle throughout: no account system, no request logging that retains identifying information.

What They Do

• Develops and maintains FastAPI route handlers, service modules, and the skills routing layer (app/services/skills/index.json)
• Builds and integrates Tier 2 external API clients (OpenSanctions, OpenCorporates, HIBP, Shodan) with environment-variable configuration and graceful degradation when keys are absent
• Manages the index_cache.pkl build process and ensures the cache is rebuilt after knowledgebase changes or skills index updates
• Writes and maintains the requirements.txt dependency manifest, running quarterly dependency hygiene reviews against known CVEs
• Instruments the backend for operational observability: logs/, stderr.log, and structured error responses that the SRE can monitor without retaining user PII
• Collaborates with the Publishing Pipeline Engineer on embedding sync endpoints and with the Data Architect on Pinecone index schema

When They Get Involved

Priya is invoked whenever a new AI skill is being integrated into the live API, when a Tier 2 data source integration is being added or updated, when the backend fails to respond or returns unexpected errors, or when a new investigation service endpoint is being designed. She is the first call for any FastAPI performance or correctness issue.

Works Closely With

• Jordan Calloway — Director of Product & Engineering — releases and architectural changes require divisional sign-off
• Devin Okafor — Publishing Pipeline Engineer — embedding sync and WP REST API calls originate from the pipeline but depend on backend service contracts
• Yusuf Tamboli — Data Architect — Pinecone index schemas, KB query routing, and entity graph API shapes are co-designed
• Imani Osei — Security Architect — JWT invite-code authentication, secrets management, and API security reviews are joint responsibilities
• Celeste Moreau — Application Architect — service-layer design, endpoint conventions, and FastAPI patterns are governed by the application architect’s standards