Backend Software Engineer, Weather & Aviation

Spire•Boulder, CO

1d•$171,000 - $202,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Spire's Weather & Aviation business delivers global weather forecasts, flight tracking, and aviation data to customers who rely on it every day to make operational decisions. As we grow, we're investing in the engineering foundations that keep our platform fast, secure, and dependable at scale. We're seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer who has helped production systems scale, harden, and stay reliable as usage and expectations grew. You'll own critical services end to end, contribute to the architecture behind our weather and aviation data services, and help raise the engineering bar as we grow. This role suits someone with experience in an established organization with production customers, uptime commitments, and compliance obligations, where a well-designed, observable, recoverable system matters more than the fastest prototype.

Requirements

6+ years' experience in professional backend software development, with significant time operating and scaling production systems that customers rely on
A track record of taking systems from "working" to "reliable": improving uptime, reducing incidents, and handling growth in data volume, traffic, or customers
Strong hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, VPC networking) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation)
Strong knowledge of OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including identity providers (e.g., Cognito, Okta, Auth0, Keycloak), JWT handling, and secure session and token management
Experience designing and operating both REST APIs and streaming or real-time data endpoints
Experience working in environments governed by NIST or ISO/IEC 27001 security standards, with an understanding of how they shape engineering decisions
Proficiency in Python or another backend language such as Go, Java, or TypeScript/Node.js
Excellent documentation, collaboration, and communication skills, and comfort making and defending architectural trade-offs

Nice To Haves

Experience with the Pangeo ecosystem (xarray, Dask, Zarr, Jupyter) or other large-scale scientific and geospatial data tooling
Background in the weather or aviation domains, including familiarity with data formats such as GRIB2 and NetCDF, aviation products such as METAR/TAF or ADS-B, or regulatory contexts such as the FAA

Responsibilities

Build and improve AWS-based backend services with a focus on availability, fault tolerance, and performance as load grows
Design and implement authentication and authorization features using OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including token handling, service-to-service auth, and access control
Develop and maintain the REST APIs and streaming endpoints (e.g., WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, or Kinesis/Kafka-backed feeds) that deliver Spire's weather and aviation data to customers
Improve observability across metrics, logging, and tracing, and help define and track SLOs for the services you own
Share ownership of production operations, including participation in an on-call rotation, incident response, and postmortems, as part of an engineering team that runs what it builds
Apply secure engineering practices day to day, and help our systems meet the NIST and ISO/IEC 27001 standards we operate under
Take the technical lead on projects within your area, from design through rollout
Mentor other engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions
Contribute to team practices for testing, deployment, infrastructure-as-code, and change management
Collaborate closely with product owners and data scientists to align backend services with customer and mission needs
Create and maintain clear documentation for APIs and system architectures