Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

ZanskarSalt Lake City, UT
Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior/Staff Backend Engineer will play a critical role developing and maintaining Zanskar’s next-generation multi-physics well-targeting engine. A successful candidate will lead, learn, collaborate, and teach. You will be a trusted leader who can both design and deliver a reliable distributed compute system that meets the ongoing needs of our scientific research teams. You will learn the domain from your peers as you identify how to migrate the system for scale and reliability. You’ll be working with some of the most brilliant geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists and engineers tackling the challenges of geothermal discovery. Collaborating with your peers to solve hard problems is the name of the game. You will bring critical skills and experience that should be taught to others. You will have the opportunity (and education) to help others better understand your craft as a distributed systems engineer, while you learn from them their craft in modeling the earth’s subsurface.

Requirements

  • Minimum 7+ years experience in software engineering in a business environment, ideally with a heavy scientific component.
  • Experience leading the design and implementation of distributed computing systems.
  • Experience with the development of fault-tolerant, resilient event-driven architectures.
  • Experience building and managing orchestration systems to massively scale cloud-based workloads (serverless, Kubernetes, and/or custom VM fleets).
  • Experience defining and developing persistent data storage for digital artifacts, both with RDBMS and cloud blob storage at scale.
  • Experience ensuring system observability through logging, monitoring, alerting and metrics.
  • Familiarity with software engineering best practices: CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar), version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi).
  • Experience architecting, permissioning and maintaining cloud resources (GCP, AWS).
  • Fluency in Python and SQL are required.

Nice To Haves

  • Experience with experiment tracking.
  • Experience with optimization methods.
  • Experience with applied algorithm development.
  • Experience with reinforcement learning and other AI/ML techniques.
  • Experience with web development.
  • Familiarity with geoscience concepts and applications.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the design and delivery of a reliable distributed compute system.
  • Migrate the system for scale and reliability.
  • Collaborate with geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists and engineers to solve hard problems.
  • Teach others about distributed systems engineering.
  • Learn about modeling the earth's subsurface.

Benefits

  • Paid holidays
  • 15 days PTO + PTO accrual increase based on tenure
  • Medical, dental and vision coverage
  • 401k
  • Stock options
  • Growth opportunities at a company with a direct impact in displacing carbon emissions
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