Senior Staff Backend Engineer, Platform Core

Archer•San Jose, CA

3d•$182,500 - $220,000

About The Position

Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise. Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members. Role Overview As a Senior Staff Backend Engineer on the Platform Core team, you will build the services that power the platform foundation — the Entity Registry, change tracking, typed source system connectors, and the integration infrastructure that every application depends on. This role focuses on Go backend services, PostgreSQL performance, and building durable infrastructure that application teams program against through the Platform SDK.

Requirements

10+ years backend engineering experience
Strong hands-on experience in Go (or equivalent backend experience with willingness to work in Go)
Deep expertise with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL, to include:
Schema design
Performance tuning
Indexing strategies
Query plan analysis
Experience building and operating distributed systems
Experience defining and implementing typed service contracts
AWS or other cloud-native infrastructure experience
Strong understanding of reliability patterns (idempotency, retries, consistency)
Demonstrated experience defining and developing APIs and SDKs

Nice To Haves

Experience building typed connectors or integration services against enterprise APIs (OData, REST, SCIM)
Experience with JSONB modeling or complex relational traversal patterns
Experience with gRPC and protobuf
Experience with change data capture (CDC) or event streaming
Experience implementing policy-as-code authorization (Cerbos, OPA, or similar)
Kubernetes (EKS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) familiarity
Experience building services consumed by LLM pipelines or AI-assisted workflows

Responsibilities

Build and maintain core backend services (Go preferred)
Build scalable systems that use a range of inter-process communication mechanisms (blackboard, direct, queues, etc.)
Build common data models from diverse data sources
Build APIs and SDKs that accelerate application development
Design and optimize PostgreSQL schemas for performance and evolution
Define and implement strongly typed reusable APIs (gRPC/protobuf or REST/OpenAPI)
Develop entity CRUD, search, and traversal capabilities
Implement change tracking and event propagation patterns (e.g., outbox pattern)
Optimize database performance (indexing strategy, query planning, connection management)
Implement middleware for authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and audit logging
Contribute to observability, reliability, and CI/CD standards
Collaborate with platform and application teams to validate services in production use cases
Support AI-assisted workflows by exposing clean, structured APIs suitable for controlled automation