Backend Software Engineer — Data Platform & AI Data Products
$120k - $170k • Remote • San Francisco
Posted 1mo ago
About the job
You will join the Data Platform team, responsible for building the backend services and data products that power how data moves through the company. This involves creating core platform primitives like high-quality event streams, reliable access layers, and developer-friendly APIs and tools. The goal is to enable teams across the organization to self-serve their data needs and ship faster. You will contribute to backend services that derive value from company data and enhance the self-serve capabilities of the data platform, allowing product and engineering teams to easily create and operate event-driven architectures, publish/consume streams, define access models, and manage data products end-to-end. Additionally, you will work on LLM-adjacent services, including prompt categorization, enrichment, and metadata systems, transforming raw telemetry into trusted, usable products with guidance from experienced engineers.
Responsibilities
- Contribute to backend services that enhance the data platform's capabilities, including APIs, control planes, automation, and governance.
- Enable DIY workflows for teams by defining/publishing events and schemas.
- Facilitate stream and subscription creation/consumption.
- Establish access models, including authorization and row/field-level controls.
- Manage dataset/catalog metadata, lineage, versioning, and retention.
- Contribute to end-to-end data products, covering ingestion, validation, enrichment, serving, observability, and adoption.
- Work on prompt categorization and enrichment services, including taxonomy design, labeling workflows, classifier/rules integration, evaluation, and monitoring.
- Own reliability aspects such as SLOs, alerting, performance/cost tuning, incident response, and postmortems.
- Partner cross-functionally with ML/LLM, infra, security, and product teams to define contracts and deliver platform primitives.
Requirements
- 0-4 years of experience building production or project-based backend systems (internships, coursework, and personal projects are accepted).
- Solid fundamentals in at least one backend language (e.g., Go, Python, Java, Rust) and some exposure to API design (REST).
- Eagerness to own work end-to-end, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, and iteration.
- Strong engineering fundamentals, focusing on clean, maintainable code, thoughtful abstractions, and building evolvable systems.
- Basic data modeling and SQL skills.
- Familiarity with at least one of: streaming/eventing (Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis), workflow/compute (Airflow/Spark/Flink/Trino), or OLTP/OLAP stores and data lakes.
- Curiosity about how AI/LLMs can be used to build software faster and better, and eagerness to apply this to your own work.
- Understanding of potential AI tool failures and thoughtful application of AI tools.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation
- Startup equity
- Health insurance
- Other competitive benefits