Senior Software Engineer - Remote

Role overview This is a senior, hands-on backend engineering position within a small, research-focused team building infrastructure for AI-driven scientific discovery. The role combines deep technical ownership of services and distributed systems with informal technical leadership, shaping architecture and raising the engineering bar while mentoring others. The work spans APIs, data pipelines, async workers, and the platform foundations that keep them reliable at scale.

Responsibilities - Design, build, and own critical backend services including APIs, data pipelines, async workers, and the supporting infrastructure for reliability at scale. - Make and document architectural decisions and trade-offs, pairing feature delivery with platform and reliability investments. - Build and maintain resilient distributed systems using patterns such as circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, and rate limiting. - Shape data models across relational and non-relational stores, plus caching layers (CDN, in-memory, application-level). - Implement observability practices: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting, contributing to infrastructure-as-code and cloud cost optimization. - Apply secure coding practices and contribute to compliance efforts; mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and architecture decision records.

Requirements - 8+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in backend systems, APIs, databases, distributed architectures, and cloud infrastructure. - Strong command of at least one backend language (Python, Go, Java, Rust, or similar) and comfort working across major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure). - Hands-on experience with relational databases (schema design, query optimization, indexing) plus familiarity with non-relational or caching layers. - Experience with Docker and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar). - Demonstrated ability to own complex, ambiguous projects end-to-end with minimal supervision, mentor engineers, and influence technical direction without formal authority. - Clear, direct communication skills, able to explain hard trade-offs to both engineers and product stakeholders.

Nice to have - Startup experience scaling systems while wearing multiple hats, and prior work with Node.js/TypeScript, AWS Lambda/CDK/Step Functions, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare, OAuth, Temporal/Airflow/Prefect, or workflow orchestration at scale.

Benefits and work setup - Remote-eligible role on a small, high-trust team where individual decisions have outsized impact. - Competitive compensation package including meaningful equity, with a culture that invests seriously in engineering excellence.