Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About the Role

As a Staff Software Backend Engineer, you will build and scale the core application logic, streaming pipelines, and data layers that power our real-time AI tracking platform. You will focus on the intersection of backend service architecture and data engineering—ensuring high-frequency telemetry data is ingested via streaming queues, accurately modeled, and reliably served to downstream web apps and AI models.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance backend systems, microservices, and APIs alongside real-time data pipelines.
• Implement stateful stream-processing applications to clean, transform, and window high-frequency telemetry and event data.
• Architect robust data models and schemas optimized for low-latency writes and fast real-time queries across relational, time-series, and caching layers.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with frontend and AI/data science to expose clean, structured data and integrated AI insights via scalable APIs.
• Participate in the full software development lifecycle, including writing integration tests, code reviews, deployment, and monitoring pipeline health.
• Investigate, debug, and optimize application bottlenecks, data serialization overhead, and query performance in production.

What You Need

• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with a balanced focus on backend systems and data pipeline development.
• Proficiency in Java, Python and/or Rust to build backend services.
• Awareness of distributed messaging systems and event-driven architectures, such as Apache Pulsar or Kafka.
• Understanding of data modeling concepts related to relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and in-memory data structures (e.g., Redis/Valkey).
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and modern cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Able to leverage AI coding assistants to increase velocity while fully understanding and taking absolute ownership of all backend code and schemas you commit.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a collaborative mindset to handle the complexities of real-time data flow.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with column-oriented or time-series data storage and analytical file formats (e.g., Parquet).
• Familiarity with geographic/spatial data processing and mapping APIs.
• Basic understanding of Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and GitOps workflows.
• Prior experience or a deep interest in aerospace, aviation, or high-throughput tracking systems.

Pay

For this position we are targeting a base pay between $190,000 - $237,000. Actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.