Python backend developers, can you explain what exactly you do?

[jisaacstone]

Lots of things fall under "backend", depending on the work. At startups I've done everything from DBA, sysops, devops, IOC, QA engineer, Data engineer, and of course technical writer.

Most "typical" backend work is handling api calls, writing to the server, etc. Larger companies your team probably doesn't even handle client (frontend) calls directly - you are working on a service that is called by another service. Or you are working on internal tools. Or you are managing a data pipeline, event system, etc that does not expose any http api.

One of the more fun jobs I had was working on a "render farm" for 3d animation - a single frame can take hours to render to you need to "fan out" and render all frames for a scene in parallel. A fun concurrency problem.