Senior Django Engineer (Bug Fixes, Stability, and Performance)

We are seeking a highly experienced senior-level Django engineer to join our team and focus on diagnosing, prioritizing, and resolving critical defects across an existing production application. The primary goal of this role is to stabilize the codebase, address various technical debts, and significantly enhance the application's overall performance and observability. The ideal candidate will possess a deep understanding of Django best practices, database management, and robust security principles. The scope of work includes conducting a rapid technical audit of the current Django codebase and its deployment pipeline to identify areas for improvement. You will be responsible for triaging bug reports from various sources such as logs, Sentry/APM traces, and direct user feedback, and subsequently creating reproducible cases for efficient resolution. This role involves fixing issues across all layers of the application, including Django views, templates, models, forms, admin interfaces, signals, and Celery tasks. A key focus will be on resolving Django ORM inefficiencies, such as N+1 queries, unnecessary joins, and identifying missing database indexes. You will also be tasked with repairing and normalizing the database schema, which includes managing migrations, enforcing constraints, optimizing unique and indexing strategies, and performing necessary data fixes. Key responsibilities include diagnosing and resolving high-priority defects with thorough root-cause analysis, optimizing ORM usage, adding appropriate indexes, and tuning database queries for maximum efficiency. You will also be crucial in hardening API security and enforcing permission checks consistently throughout the application stack. Finally, establishing reliable CI workflows and implementing effective test gates will be essential to prevent regressions and ensure long-term code stability.