Senior Backend / Systems Engineer

Random Walk has delivered best in class alternative data insights focused on consumer email behavior for over a decade. We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to help design and operate high-volume, distributed backend systems . This role focuses on data ingestion, asynchronous processing, and scalable service design in a production environment with real-world constraints. You’ll be expected to own critical backend components end-to-end and make pragmatic decisions around performance, reliability, and cost. Core skills & how you’ll use them Backend programming (Go, Python) Build and maintain high-throughput services and background workers. Asynchronous & event-driven systems Design pipelines using queues and workers to process large volumes of data reliably. Message queues & streaming systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS, RabbitMQ, Redis, etc.) Handle fan-out processing, retries, backpressure, and fault isolation. Third-party API integrations Build resilient integrations that handle rate limits, partial failures, retries, and schema changes. OAuth2 & secure access patterns Implement token-based access flows and manage long-lived integrations safely. Structured & unstructured data processing Normalize, parse, and extract meaningful data from inconsistent inputs (HTML, text, metadata). Distributed system reliability Implement idempotency, deduplication, observability, and graceful failure handling. Cloud & containerized environments Deploy and operate services using Docker and cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes experience is a plus). ML inference or classification pipelines Integrate or operate inference/classification workflows (rules-based, ML-based, or hybrid) in production systems Design and operate pipelines that ingest and process high volumes of data using event-driven and asynchronous architectures. Education Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Experience Minimum of 5 years experience working in a team environment deploying technology solutions. Leadership Strong communication and leadership skills with a passion for building. Minimum of 3 professional references. Location Must be located in Southern California Position Competitive salary and equity incentives Free lunches please submit CV with brief 4-5 sentences note specifically describing how your recent experiences will help lead in this role. #J-18808-Ljbffr Ranwalk