Senior Backend Engineer

Judgment Labs • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own the services and APIs that power the data layer. You'll design the systems that ingest, evaluate, and serve agent telemetry at scale.

Requirements

• 6+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems and services.
• Strong fundamentals in API design, data modeling, and the trade-offs of distributed systems under real production load.
• Hands-on experience with OLAP / columnar databases (ClickHouse, Presto) and a feel for how query patterns map to storage internals.
• Experience designing high-performance distributed systems.
• Comfort across the stack, with the breadth to reason about platform and infra decisions.
• Strong communication skills. You write clearly, review well, and make the people around you better.

Nice To Haves

• Experience scaling pipelines that fan out to LLM APIs and managing the rate-limit, retry, and cost dynamics that come with them.
• Familiarity with streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Ray) and ML orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).
• Background in embedding / vector search infrastructure or data quality monitoring.
• Prior work on observability or developer-facing platform products.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-throughput backend services that ingest and process hundreds of thousands of agent traces per second.
• Own the API surface our SDKs and dashboards depend on: define contracts, manage versioning, and keep latency low under real customer load.
• Tune our OLAP layer (ClickHouse) through schema design, query optimization, and access-pattern analysis so reads stay fast as data grows to petabyte scale.
• Partner with the platform and infra teams on scalability, reliability, and the systems that back our evaluation and monitoring pipelines.
• Advocate for a high bar on backend and engineering quality: reliable, efficient, well-documented, testable, and maintainable.

What This Job Offers

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