Senior Backend Engineer

Plot Technologies • New York City, NY

1d

About The Position

Plot is building the next generation of social intelligence — an AI-native platform that helps some of the world's most influential brands understand culture, find emerging trends, and activate their communities at scale. We're a high-growth, venture-backed startup supported by the co-founders of Reddit and Plaid, with customers like Tory Burch, Lululemon, La Roche-Posay, and other household names. We operate at the intersection of applied AI and large-scale data systems, turning millions of short-form videos every day into structured representations of culture and consumer behavior. Plot makes unstructured social media legible at scale, enabling brands to build a deep, systematic understanding of trends, audiences, and influence. You'll join a small but mighty team where engineers own systems end-to-end — not tickets. You'll work directly with founders, shape foundational architecture, and make decisions that define how Plot scales for years to come. If you enjoy ambiguous problems, deep systems thinking, and building infrastructure that unlocks entire product surfaces, Plot is the place. It’s also a great fit if you aspire to be a technical founder one day — we operate with a strong founder’s mindset.

Requirements

• Deep experience operating Postgres in production under real-world read/write concurrency, including understanding partitioning, locking, autovacuum, connection pooling, and failure modes.
• Strong systems intuition; ability to think in bottlenecks, failure modes, and tradeoffs.
• Experience designing or owning analytical data architectures, including read-optimized schemas, aggregations, or large-scale querying patterns.
• Comfort leading ambiguous, high-impact work; ability to take a messy system, form a clear mental model, and chart a pragmatic path forward.
• High ownership mindset; enjoys digging into logs, metrics, and real data, with a focus on correctness, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Curiosity, pragmatism, and a desire to build foundational systems that other engineers and AI systems depend on.
• Minimum 5 years of relevant experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the core data systems that power Plot, taking responsibility for how millions of enriched videos flow from ingestion → storage → analytics → product surfaces.
• Stabilize and harden high-throughput write paths by diagnosing failure modes, reducing error rates, and making ingestion reliable, observable, and predictable.
• Design data access patterns that stay fast under pressure, ensuring dashboards and analytical queries remain responsive even while large volumes of data are being written concurrently.
• Separate transactional and analytical concerns by leading decisions around workload placement and designing systems and contracts to prevent interference.
• Build read-optimized models for insight, including partitioning strategies, rollups, and schemas that reflect actual data querying patterns.
• Enable AI-native analytics by shaping how internal tools and AI agents query and reason over data.
• Make architectural calls that matter by evaluating tradeoffs, writing RFCs, and guiding the evolution of Plot’s data platform.
• Raise the bar for reliability and performance across the team by defining best practices, unblocking other engineers, and becoming a go-to resource for data-related decisions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed