Senior Backend & Infrastructure Engineer

Role overview

Senior Backend & Infrastructure Engineer (hands-on)

Build the backend and infrastructure that powers labs that run themselves. You will write production code, make architecture choices, and own systems end-to-end—from design through deployment, monitoring, and incident response—while treating production as a product.

Responsibilities

• Own core platform systems: backend services, messaging, databases, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, security, and reliability.
• Design and operate cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure for scale, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Build backend services using either:
  • Python + FastAPI, or
  • Java + Spring Boot (or closely related frameworks)
• Deliver backend performance & reliability across services, dependencies, queues, caches, databases, and external integrations.
• Run production end-to-end: deployments, monitoring, alerting, debugging, incident response, post-incident follow-up, and capacity planning.
• Implement event-driven/asynchronous workflows using RabbitMQ (or similar messaging).
• Improve performance using caching (e.g., Redis) to boost latency, throughput, and resilience.
• Operate multiple data workloads, including:
  • relational (e.g., RDS),
  • graph workloads (e.g., Cosmos DB),
  • NoSQL/vector workloads (e.g., MongoDB Atlas).
• Build observability with logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts (e.g., Datadog, ELK).
• Enhance security: VPC design, secrets management, access control, encryption, auditability.
• Automate operational work into code, tools, runbooks, and guardrails.
• Make trade-offs between speed, reliability, maintainability, compliance, and cloud cost.

What you’ll work on (examples)

• Absorbing bursts of instrument/workflow data without duplicates or customer-facing slowdown.
• Preserving sample lineage, permissions, and audit history as data moves through systems.

Requirements

• Senior-level experience owning production backend and infrastructure systems.
• Hands-on capability across backend services + messaging + databases + cloud + CI/CD + observability.
• Ability to debug incidents across code, queues, caches, and infrastructure.

Nice-to-haves (implied)

• Experience with EKS rollouts and production cloud reliability/cost optimization.
• Familiarity with AI pipeline workload optimization.
• Strong security engineering practices for cloud boundaries and data protection.