Should a background process be part of Django project?

I'm trying to build a web app which provide an interface to do some queries upon data extracted from another public API server.

To complete the queries in real time, I would have to prefetch the data from the public API server.

So I think it is reasonable to separate the app deal with query input(there is still some logic here, so only javascript wouldn't be enough) from the app which runs in background and builds the database which could possibly answer the query in real time.

Then what comes to my mind is does this background app really have to be a part of Django project? It runs almost without interacting with any Django component. Except for the database which is also accessible by a Django app and some signals maybe(when to start/stop collecting data, but this could probably also decided internally).

What would a be good design choice for my situation?