Staff Software Engineer, Real Time Analytics - San Francisco HQ

Orb•San Francisco, CA

4d•$195,000 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Every usage-based business eventually asks the same three questions in real time: what has this customer consumed, what are they entitled to, and what should happen next? This team owns the runtime layer where billing state becomes something customers can act on — alerting, spend controls, entitlement checks, and usage analytics. This is a foundational role. Enterprise and AI customers increasingly treat entitlements, spend controls, and real-time analytics as a single problem rather than three separate features, which makes this one of the highest-leverage areas of Orb's roadmap. You'll help set the direction, the primitives, and the interfaces other teams build against. The work sits squarely at the intersection of infrastructure and product. On one side, it's real systems engineering: alerts, balances, and entitlement checks computed against actual tiers, credits, and commits, fast and reliably enough to stand behind latency guarantees. On the other, it's a customer-facing product surface where API design, clarity, and getting the primitives right matter as much as the systems underneath. You'll spend as much time understanding what customers are trying to do as you will building the thing that does it. You'll build the system customers rely on to know, in real time, what's been consumed, what's allowed, and what should happen next — the reactive side that alerts the moment a limit is crossed, and the proactive side that serves live balance and entitlement state on demand. Because it runs against Orb's real pricing, credits, and commits, customers can put it directly in the critical path of their own spend and access decisions — the layer they reach for as they scale.

Requirements

9+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of owning products or systems end to end
Energized by ambiguity and ownership — you want a say in what gets built, not just how
Strong product instincts and genuine customer empathy; you like being close to customers and to the business impact of your work (this is revenue-adjacent, and people trust these numbers)
Comfortable designing APIs and data models that other teams and customers depend on
Enough systems depth to reason clearly about real-time and low-latency tradeoffs — this team leans product, but the engineering is real
Attention to detail across API design, product UX, and everything in between

Nice To Haves

Experience with Orb's Tech Stack: Frontend: Typescript + React + Tailwind CSS, Backend: Python, Datastores: PostgreSQL + Apache Druid + Clickhouse, Streaming Platforms: Kafka + Spark Streaming, Cloud Platform: AWS

Responsibilities

Own a product surface end to end — from customer conversations and product design through API design, implementation, and rollout
Design and ship alerting and analytics that are granular, flexible, and fast enough to carry contractual latency SLAs
Build the entitlement and spend-control primitives (credit balances, allocations, usage-percentage alerts, rate limits) that enforce against Orb's real billing state in real time
Shape the roadmap, primitives, and interfaces other teams build against — foundational decisions that are still open
Collaborate across PM, design, sales, and customer success, and work directly with enterprise and AI customers to turn their pain points into what we build