Specter

Specter

Software Engineer - Backend

San Francisco

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 292 days ago
PythonGoNode.jsDistributed SystemsBackend DevelopmentFull-Stack DevelopmentPostgreSQLAWSDockerKubernetesTerraformCI/CDKafkaData EngineeringComputer VisionAgentic AIIncident Response

About the role

  • This role sits at the foundation of Specter's product stack-owning the reliability, performance, and scalability of the backend systems that everything else is built on.

Responsibilities

  • Architect and implement scalable backend services and data pipelines for high-throughput, real-time streams of video, sensor, and detection data.
  • Design and optimize distributed storage and compute systems for low-latency data access and high availability.
  • Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform to manage cloud resources in AWS.
  • Build and operate Kubernetes-based deployments with a focus on reliability, observability, and efficient resource utilization.
  • Design relational and time-series data models in PostgreSQL, optimizing for ingestion throughput and query performance.
  • Develop event-driven architectures using Kafka, SQS, or similar messaging systems.
  • Collaborate with perception and full-stack teams to define API contracts and data flow designs across real-time and analytical workloads.
  • Own the reliability of core backend systems, including on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.
  • Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments.
  • Specter is hiring a backend engineer to design and scale the distributed systems that power our cloud-based perception platform.

Requirements

  • Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
  • Deep proficiency in Python, Go, or Node.js with a solid foundation in systems-level thinking.
  • Extensive experience with AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, SQS, Lambda, VPC networking).
  • Hands-on experience with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tools.
  • Experience with containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD automation.
  • Familiarity with event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent).
  • Strong PostgreSQL skills-schema design, query optimization, and migration strategies.
  • Solid understanding of networking, security, and identity management in cloud environments.
  • Interest in physical AI, IoT, or large-scale distributed sensing systems.

Benefits

  • We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.
  • You'll build the services, data pipelines, and infrastructure that ingest, process, and serve real-time video, sensor, and computer vision data at scale.

Company info

  • We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

This listing is sourced directly from Specter's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.