Senior Backend Engineer

What You'll Work On

• Own the core data systems that power Plot.
  • Take responsibility for how millions of enriched videos flow from ingestion → storage → analytics → product surfaces.
  • Stabilize and harden high-throughput write paths.
  • Diagnose failure modes, reduce error rates, and make ingestion reliable, observable, and predictable.
  • Design data access patterns that stay fast under pressure.
  • Ensure dashboards and analytical queries remain responsive even while large volumes of data are being written concurrently.
  • Separate transactional and analytical concerns.
  • Lead decisions around which workloads belong where, and design the systems and contracts that keep them from stepping on each other.
  • Build read-optimized models for insight, not just storage.
  • Include partitioning strategies, rollups, and schemas that reflect how data is actually queried — by humans and by AI.
  • Enable AI-native analytics.
  • Shape how our internal tools and AI agents query and reason over data.
  • Making it possible to answer complex analytical questions without brute-force scans.
  • Make architectural calls that matter.
  • Evaluate tradeoffs, write RFCs, and guide the evolution of Plot’s data platform as scale, product needs, and AI capabilities grow.
  • Raise the bar for reliability and performance across the team.
  • Define best practices, unblock other engineers, and become a go-to resource for data-related decisions.

What We're Looking For

• Deep experience operating Postgres in production under real-world read/write concurrency.
• You understand partitioning, locking, autovacuum, connection pooling, and why systems fail in subtle ways.
• Strong systems intuition.
• You think in bottlenecks, failure modes, and tradeoffs — not just indexes or tooling.
• Experience designing or owning analytical data architectures, including read-optimized schemas, aggregations, or large-scale querying patterns.
• Comfort leading ambiguous, high-impact work.
• You can take a messy system, form a clear mental model, and chart a pragmatic path forward.
• High ownership mindset.
• You like digging into logs, metrics, and real data — and you care deeply about correctness, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Curiosity, pragmatism, and a desire to build foundational systems that other engineers and AI systems depend on.
• No degree requirements.
• Minimum 5 years of relevant experience.