Backend Engineer

Treeswift Inc•New York, NY

1d•$160,000 - $215,000

About The Position

In the face of rising threats like severe storms and wildfires, increasing pressure on affordability, and unprecedented demands for system expansion, Treeswift empowers energy companies to modernize their field work to meet the growth and challenges ahead. To accomplish our mission, we deploy our sensors into our customers' field operations, typically on backpacks or vehicles. The resulting trove of LiDAR and imagery data is processed through our AI models to deliver actionable analytics through our web platform. To date, our technology has enabled utilities to reduce wildfire, regulatory and outage risk from vegetation, avoid delays and cost overruns in new construction, and accelerate recovery from severe storms. Since our first utility pilot in June 2024, we have rapidly expanded and now work with three of the five largest utilities in the United States and are expanding across new customers and use cases. To tackle this challenge, we are bringing together a team of mission-driven experts with deep industry experience in robotics (Penn, Caltech, CMU) and enterprise software development (Palantir, Stripe, Oracle, MongoDB). We have raised funding from leading investors including Penny Pritzker’s Inspired Capital. Treeswift is headquartered in lower Manhattan, and maintains an office in Philadelphia. We also have some customer-facing team members based closer to our customer sites (i.e. Bay Area). We strongly support our employees (including software engineers) to visit customer sites — ask us about this! We hope you’ll join us on this journey. Build and own the backend services and infrastructure behind our web platform, the system our utility customers rely on to act on the analytics we derive from field data. Our backend is primarily Python (Django) backed by PostgreSQL with geospatial capabilities, running on Kubernetes in AWS. You'll work across the full lifecycle: data modeling, API design, authentication, deployment, and operations. This is a role for someone who wants to own systems end-to-end and help scale a platform that is growing rapidly alongside our customer base. Be comfortable engaging directly with our customers to help build product understanding. Thanks to our close partnerships with some of the largest and most complex utilities in the United Stated, you will have the opportunity to see the impact of your work in the real-world by observing users use our product on a daily basis. Stay curious, collaborative, and cross-functional while also taking ownership of problems. We translate complex, real-world requirements from a critical industry into high-quality data products, so understanding the business holistically is key. We take pride in managing complexity and providing high-fidelity data that our customers can use to make better-informed decisions.

Requirements

You have 7+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production web services
You are proficient in Python and comfortable with Django's ORM, migrations, and middleware model (or a comparable framework like FastAPI)
You have experience with PostgreSQL or a solid understanding of database fundamentals: schema design, query optimization, migrations, and operational basics
You have hands-on experience with writing your code to run in Docker: containerized deployments, resource configuration, debugging pod issues, and working with CI/CD pipelines
You understand authentication and authorization patterns: OAuth2, OIDC, JWT validation, and session management
You communicate clearly across technical and non-technical teams and thrive in a collaborative, fast-moving environment

Nice To Haves

Experience with Kubernetes and Terraform/OpenTofu
Experience with geospatial data (PostGIS, GeoJSON, GeoDjango) or domains involving sensor data
Experience with Keycloak or identity provider administration
Prior experience at an early-stage startup where you've had to build and iterate quickly with limited resources
Interest in utilities, infrastructure, and/or field operations and how software supports those domains.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain the REST APIs that serve our React frontend and integrate with internal services, owning API design decisions and ensuring our OpenAPI specs stay accurate for frontend type generation
Develop and evolve our PostgreSQL data layer, including geospatial queries via PostGIS, schema migrations, and data modeling for complex domain objects like patrols, work orders, tree inspections, and geospatial boundaries
Own deployment and infrastructure for our backend services, including Docker containerization, Kubernetes deployments on AWS EKS, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform/OpenTofu
Collaborate closely with the data platform and ML teams whose pipelines produce the data your APIs serve, and with frontend engineers who consume them daily.