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# Staff Backend Engineer, Data Platform

- **Company:** OSMO
- **Location:** Elizabeth, United States
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** BigQuery, Encodings, Concurrency Controls, Data Infrastructure, Data Sharing, Python (Programming Language), PostgreSQL, Reference Data, Service Design, Management of Software Versions, Technical Debt
- **Published:** September 4, 2026
- **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/staff-backend-engineer-data-platform-osmo-ai-9832613

## About the Role

The strongest signal for this role is having been accountable for a shared data model that multiple teams depended on: getting those teams to agree what a concept means, encoding that agreement in the schema, and keeping it consistent across systems that each hold their own copy, under retries, reordering, and partial failure., * Depth in asynchronous and event-driven service design, including idempotency, concurrency control, and the integration patterns that keep systems consistent

 * Advanced data modeling and schema design, including temporal and audit requirements where you have to reconstruct what the system knew at a point in time
 * Sound judgment on technical debt, meaning deliberate tradeoffs, a clear view of what they cost, and the discipline to know where not to compromise
 * Demonstrated impact on team capability, including standards that persisted beyond your involvement and engineers whose growth you can speak to specifically
 * Strong partnership with non-technical domain experts, translating what they ask for into what the data platform should actually build, and technical tradeoffs into decisions they can make
 * Hands-on Python across our stack or close equivalents, including Postgres, BigQuery, GCS, and containerized services and scheduled jobs on Cloud Run

Nice to have

 * Establishing data standards or architectural practice in an organization without them
 * Collaborating with scientific or technical domain experts and translating their vocabulary into a data model

## Description

* Own consistency across systems that each hold their own copy, under retries, reordering, and partial failure, from ingestion off upstream systems through routing each use to the right destination
 * Lead canonical schema design and evolution while systems are already reading and writing through the model, covering migrations, versioning, and reference data with effective dates so past decisions stay provable
 * Define the system architecture, including systems of record, ownership boundaries, replication strategy, and access control
 * Design the write path where automated and human writes arrive concurrently and sometimes conflict, covering validation, permissions, and audit history complete enough to reconstruct who changed what and why
 * Set the data modeling standards, and be the engineer consulted before shared entities change


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