Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. FPSG is recruiting for an AI startup solving a difficult problem in manufacturing. The Staff Backend Engineer will shape and scale backend systems and infrastructure, owning complex Go and Python services with a focus on resilience, scalability, and performance. The role also involves data platform ownership, architectural leadership, production migrations, cross-functional collaboration, and mentoring engineers.
Responsibilities
- Leading designing, implementing and scaling of backend infrastructure and services, primarily in Go
- Owning the data platform layer, designing and executing database sharding and partitioning strategies, evaluate and potentially migrate toward self-hosted Postgres, and build custom index strategies for embedding-heavy workloads
- Designing and driving data migration strategies that are safe to run against production systems at scale
- Ensuring backend systems are resilient, observable, and performant under high customer load
- Driving architectural decisions for long-term scalability and maintainability
- Contributing significant code to core backend systems, focusing on efficiency, robustness, and developer velocity
- Collaborating closely with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver high-quality features
- Mentoring and supporting other engineers, fostering growth and knowledge sharing
Skills
- Proven track record turning ambiguous problem statements into shipped, reliable backend systems
- Significant expertise in Go, with deep knowledge of performance optimization, concurrency, and distributed systems
- Deep, hands-on experience managing Postgres in production at scale, including tuning, replication, vacuuming, and operational ownership beyond managed cloud services
- Experience running and operating self-hosted Postgres (not just RDS or equivalent), including storage optimization and infrastructure-level configuration
- Proven experience designing and executing data migrations and database scaling strategies (sharding, partitioning, tiered storage) in live production environments
- Proficiency with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Hands-on experience designing observable and operable systems, using metrics, logs, traces, testing, and alerts to detect and diagnose issues early (Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
- Hands-on experience stepping outside core backend ownership into one or more of infrastructure (cloud, IaC), ML systems (Python), or frontend (React) to solve integration problems, unblock teams, and directly implement
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