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 qualified

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

📌 Backend & Data Engineer — Multimodal AI Platform - Freelance (Canada)
🏢 CrowdPlat
📍 Canada