Associate Backend Engineer

## Who We Are At Bluehost, we believe all small businesses deserve the opportunity to succeed online. Our mission is to give small businesses the confidence to think big. We're the all-in-one platform for small businesses to grow online with powerful simplicity, premium performance, smart tools and human support. ## Why we're hiring for this role Hosting is the engine room of Bluehost, the systems that keep millions of small-business websites online, every day. This is a strong entry point for an engineer who wants to build real fundamentals in Python, Linux, and MySQL while working on infrastructure that matters at real scale, on a team investing heavily in modernization and AI-assisted engineering. ## What You'll Do & How You'll Make Your Mark - Build and maintain backend services, internal tools, and automations in Python - Support Linux-based production systems: navigating services, reading logs, and troubleshooting day-to-day operational issues - Write, and test MySQL queries against production-scale data, building query-optimization skills along the way - Use AI across the delivery lifecycle — coding, debugging, tests, and ramping on unfamiliar code — and review what it generates before you ship it, checking it against the codebase rather than trusting it on sight - Pair with senior engineers to turn requirements into well-tested, maintainable, production-ready code - Participate in code reviews, sprint ceremonies, and team documentation, building habits that scale as you grow - Help troubleshoot and resolve production issues alongside the broader Hosting team, learning incident response as you go ## Who You Are & What You'll Need to Succeed - 1-3 years of backend development experience - Working knowledge of Python, including writing and testing scripts and services - Basic Linux systems knowledge: navigating the shell, checking service status, reading logs - Familiarity with MySQL, including basic query writing (experience with another relational database also considered) - AI-augmented delivery: you use AI across the delivery lifecycle, not just code generation, and can say where it helps you and where you don't rely on it. You review AI-generated code knowing its failure modes rather than accepting it as-is, and you work within the boundaries set for what customer data enters a prompt. - Genuine eagerness to learn hosting infrastructure and backend fundamentals at scale - Bonus: exposure to REST APIs, Git workflows, or basic automation/scripting outside of Python. Understanding of Perl or basic cPanel concepts are nice to have but not required.