Staff Backend / Database Infrastructure Engineer

Our requirements

• At least 5 years of production backend engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience building or core-contributing to a database, queue, indexing layer or large-scale data system.
• Strong understanding of storage, ingestion and query paths.
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems under real production load.
• Ability to discuss previous systems quantitatively, including throughput, data volume, latency, SLAs, bottlenecks and failure modes.
• Evidence of personal ownership: you personally designed and built meaningful parts of the system.
• Ability to build complete systems rather than work only on narrowly scoped components.
• Strong architectural judgment combined with a bias toward shipping and iteration.
• Experience operating without extensive process, detailed specifications or organizational scaffolding.
• Clear written and verbal English communication.
• Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, together with a practical understanding of their strengths and trade-offs.
• Availability for substantial daily overlap with US working hours. For candidates based in Europe, this means working during the late afternoon and part of the evening.
• We care more about technical depth, judgment and measurable impact than a specific title, programming language or number of years in one particular stack.

Optional

• Experience as a founding engineer, first or second engineer, or one of the first ten hires at a startup.
• Experience within a modern database, data infrastructure or observability company.
• Open-source contributions to projects such as PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka, Temporal, LiveKit or similar infrastructure.
• Production experience with Scala, Rust, Haskell or another systems-oriented language.
• Experience with voice technology, telephony, WebRTC, audio pipelines or real-time communications.
• Experience building systems processing gigabytes or terabytes of data per day.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, ClickHouse, Temporal or custom indexing systems.
• Personal systems, database or open-source projects built outside of your primary employment.
• Voice and telephony experience is not required. The company would rather teach the voice domain to an exceptional systems engineer than try to teach deep systems engineering to a domain specialist.

Your responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of a purpose-built database and indexing architecture.
• Scale the simulation engine toward 100,000+ concurrent voice calls.
• Build high-throughput ingestion, storage and query infrastructure.
• Develop systems for processing call recordings, transcripts, metadata and evaluation results.
• Improve reliability, latency and performance across the platform’s highest-load paths.
• Build infrastructure supporting AI red-teaming and production monitoring.
• Make key architectural decisions and turn them into working prototypes quickly.
• Own projects end-to-end, from an ambiguous problem to production deployment.
• Help establish the technical direction for a system that can become a long-term company moat.

About the project

Interested?

Recruitment stages

• 1.
  15-minute introductory and culture conversation.
• 2.
  Open-book backend coding interview using preferred AI tools.
• 3.
  System design interview.
• 4.
  Second system design interview.
• 5.
  Optional paid 2-3 day trial if further validation is needed.
• 6.
  Reference checks and offer.