Staff Backend Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Platform Software Engineer to join our platform team and help build the services that power the future of scientific research. You will develop and maintain critical APIs and services that enable scientists to orchestrate complex experiments remotely. This role offers the unique opportunity to solve challenging problems at the intersection of cloud computing, laboratory automation, and scientific instrumentation.

You will join a small, high-impact team where ownership and leadership are essential. As a team member helping to build the Engineering team as well as the product, you will also be encouraged to contribute to the software engineering practices we maintain in our own work, and which we bring to ECL as a whole. We strive to be continually critical of our process, cutting cruft and homing in on performance multipliers (such as continuous integration and agile development practices).

In this role you will

• Design and develop highly scalable backend services, ensuring performance and security
• Collaborate with designers, scientists and engineers to deliver products solving real challenges experienced in labs by our users
• Help set technical and product direction, collaborating with the team to determine the future of the product, what features to build, and how to build them
• Ensure continual, high-availability operation of our services using modern reliability practices, including detailed observability and participation in an on-call rotation
• Participate in code reviews and troubleshoot any performance or security issues
• Advocate for healthy and maintainable software practices

Examples of projects

• Improving our hybrid object / graph multi-tenant data store that supports describing all standard biology and chemistry experiments in code
• Develop new services to gather real time data from sensors in our lab and make them available to operators for live feedback and to our cloud for further processing and aggregation
• Building a service to safely distribute and execute simulation, analysis, and testing code in SLL
• Working closely with our Scientific Development team in developing and optimizing data storage, retrieval and search functions in SLL

Our Tech Stack

Our backend services are written in Go, Python or Rust, and deployed on AWS infrastructure in Docker containers, with container orchestration through Kubernetes. Our applications are web apps (React / HTML5 / CSS3) running on the desktop through NW.js, across Windows and Mac OS. Our source code control is on Github, with integration with Travis CI for continuous testing. The Symbolic Lab Language is written in the Wolfram Language.

More broadly, developing the software to enable cloud-based science is an expansive, diverse challenge. A core component of our job is consistently determining the right tools for the job at hand, and diving in to learn these new technologies along the way.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience providing backend development to products and enterprise software
• 6+ years in Cloud or AWS hands on development
• Experience with database technologies (SQL or NoSQL)
• Experience working with startups or small growing companies.
• Full life cycle experience with software product development
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes and Docker for containerization
• Experience with distributed systems
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and modern build tooling
• Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), containers, and observability