Staff, Backend Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

* Build the platform: Build and scale robust, concurrent core platform components designed to handle Sequen's rapid growth and high transactional throughput.

* Architect composable systems: Design and architect composable platform components that deliver exceptional value across a wide variety of enterprise use cases.

* Collaborate across teams: Partner closely with product and ML engineering teams to deeply understand their requirements and build platform capabilities that accelerate feature delivery.

* Drive architectural decisions: Make critical build-versus-buy decisions, evaluating and implementing third-party or open-source solutions when they yield the highest strategic impact.

* Set technical vision: Define the long-term technical direction, standards, and vision for various product and platform features.

* Partner with research: Collaborate closely with our ML research scientists to quickly prototype and launch new capabilities based on research breakthroughs.

ABOUT YOU

* Proven track record: Bring 8+ years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building highly performant, scalable distributed systems.

* Go language mastery: Possess an expert-level command of Go (Golang) as your primary programming language for building highly concurrent systems.

* Service-oriented expertise: Demonstrate strong systems-level skills and extensive experience designing and operating complex service-oriented architectures.

* Startup DNA: Thrive in early-stage, fast-moving, or rapidly evolving environments, with a proven history of building and scaling systems from 0 to 1.

* Extreme ownership: Take absolute accountability for your work, navigating ambiguity with agility and proactively resolving obstacles to deliver results.

* System-wide comfort: Operate comfortably across any layer of the stack, diving into cloud infrastructure, core microservices, or developer tooling to deliver complete, effective solutions.

* Passion for AI systems: Enjoy working alongside a fast-paced, elite team tackling cutting-edge challenges at the intersection of systems engineering and AI ranking.

* Product-focused mindset: Approach platform engineering with a product-focused lens, caring deeply about building systems that are robust, highly scalable, and easy to use.

* Academic foundations: Hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.

Strong Candidates May Also Bring

* Polyglot capabilities: Bring a firm grasp of Python for machine learning pipelines and scripting integrations.

* Infrastructure fluency: Know your way around container orchestration (kubectl, Kubernetes) and Infrastructure-as-Code (terraform).

* ML alignment: Have worked directly with NLP and ML models, understanding their deployment patterns, performance capabilities, and operational limits.

* Modern API design: Possess deep experience designing and implementing highly performant, secure RESTful and gRPC APIs.

* Full-stack exposure: Bring lightweight experience with React and modern frontend frameworks to help build internal diagnostics and visualization tools.

What We Offer

* High-impact influence: A high-autonomy, staff-level Individual Contributor (IC) role directly shaping our core backend architecture and platform evolution.

* Pioneering systems: The unique opportunity to build mission-critical, low-latency systems powering advanced ML experiences at enterprise scale.

* Top-tier reward: Highly competitive base salary, plus meaningful early-stage equity.

* Premium benefits: Full health insurance coverage, unlimited paid time off, and a highly collaborative, world-class engineering culture.