Senior Backend Engineer

LINDA S. LEVINE
San Francisco, CA, United States
about 2 months ago

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience level
Expert
Experience required
6 years minimum
Working hours
Regular working hours
Job source

Tech stack

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) Airflow Encodings Databases Distributed Systems Online Analytical Processing Pattern Recognition Query Optimization Management of Software Versions Web Services Large Language Models Apache Spark
+9 more
Backend Data Layers Build Management Apache Flink Apache Kafka Presto Vertica Api Design Stream Processing

Job description

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own the services and APIs that power the data layer. You’ll design the systems that ingest, evaluate, and serve agent telemetry at scale., * Design and build high-throughput backend services that ingest and process hundreds of thousands of agent traces per second.

  • Own the API surface our SDKs and dashboards depend on: define contracts, manage versioning, and keep latency low under real customer load.
  • Tune our OLAP layer (ClickHouse) through schema design, query optimization, and access-pattern analysis so reads stay fast as data grows to petabyte scale.
  • Partner with the platform and infra teams on scalability, reliability, and the systems that back our evaluation and monitoring pipelines.
  • Advocate for a high bar on backend and engineering quality: reliable, efficient, well-documented, testable, and maintainable.

Requirements

Do you have experience in Web services design?, * 6+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems and services.

  • Strong fundamentals in API design, data modeling, and the trade-offs of distributed systems under real production load.
  • Hands-on experience with OLAP / columnar databases (ClickHouse, Presto) and a feel for how query patterns map to storage internals.
  • Experience designing high-performance distributed systems.
  • Comfort across the stack, with the breadth to reason about platform and infra decisions.
  • Strong communication skills. You write clearly, review well, and make the people around you better., * Experience scaling pipelines that fan out to LLM APIs and managing the rate-limit, retry, and cost dynamics that come with them.
  • Familiarity with streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Ray) and ML orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).
  • Background in embedding / vector search infrastructure or data quality monitoring.
  • Prior work on observability or developer-facing platform products.

Apply for this position

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Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

1:52 min

Structuring and scaling the backend engineering team

Stefan Lingler Stefan Lingler +1 · Coffee With Developers

2:15 min

Empowering domain teams with an open data platform

Sandhya Menon Sandhya Menon · WWC Europe 2026

1:09 min

Evaluating mature stream processing frameworks for production systems

Soroosh Khodami Soroosh Khodami · WWC 2024

1:38 min

Transitioning into backend engineering from web development

Stefan Lingler Stefan Lingler +1 · Coffee With Developers

3:05 min

Audience questions on AI agents and pipeline vectorization

Joy Joy · WWC 2024

1:12 min

Choosing TypeScript for complex backend applications

Maximilian Otto Maximilian Otto · WWC 2024

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