Valency
Senior Software Engineer - Backend Systems
Berkeley, CA · Senior
No sponsorshipDetected 63 days ago
TypeScriptPythonJavaGoRustNode.jsDistributed SystemsBackend DevelopmentCode ReviewPostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBRedisDynamoDBAWSGCPAzureCloud PlatformsDockerKubernetesTerraformCI/CDTemporalKafka
About the role
- We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who will report to the Head of Engineering.
- This person thrives deep in the codebase, raises the bar for everyone around them, and ships work that stands the test of time.
- You'll be a trusted voice in architectural decisions, a go-to resource for hard problems, and a mentor to the engineers around you, all while staying deeply hands-on.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own critical backend services - APIs, data pipelines, async workers, and the infrastructure that keeps them running reliably at scale
- Make sound architectural decisions and document trade-offs clearly so the whole team can learn from them
- Drive platform and reliability investments alongside feature work - the foundational improvements that keep pace with growth
- Design and maintain distributed systems that are resilient to failure - applying patterns like circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, and rate limiting where they count
- Own the full lifecycle of services from design through deployment, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure
- Implement and iterate on observability practices: structured logging, metrics dashboards, distributed tracing, and alerting
- Design performant, well-normalized data models across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and non-relational (Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB) stores
- Build and maintain data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, and integrations with third-party services and external APIs
- Work with message queues and event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ) to build decoupled, async architectures
- Be the go-to engineer for hard problems - unblock teammates, provide crisp technical direction, and raise the quality of design reviews
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in backend systems - APIs, databases, distributed architectures, and cloud infrastructure
- Hands-on experience with relational databases (schema design, query optimization, indexing) and familiarity with non-relational or caching layers
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines
- Track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without formal authority
- Clear, direct communication - you can explain a hard trade-off to an engineer and a product manager alike
Nice to have
- Experience working in a startup environment - you've built and scaled systems while the business was growing rapidly underneath them, worn multiple hats, and thrived in ambiguity
- Experience with our stack or adjacent: Node.js/TypeScript, AWS Lambda/CDK/Step Functions, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare
- Familiarity with auth systems (e.g. OAuth) and observability tooling
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Temporal, Airflow, Prefect) and async job processing at scale
- Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) and cloud cost management
- This role rewards engineers who think in systems - who aren't satisfied shipping a feature that works today if it'll break at 10x scale.
- You're someone who:
- Leaves code, documentation, and systems measurably better than you found them
Skills
- Contribute to infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and cloud cost optimization
- Apply caching strategies thoughtfully - CDN, in-memory, and application-level - and understand the failure modes of each
Compensation
- Compensation, Benefits & Equity
Benefits
- Compensation, Benefits & Equity
- We offer a competitive salary, benefits, and meaningful equity in a company building something important from the ground up.
- Establish and uphold high standards for code quality, test coverage, and operational excellence
Visa & Work Authorization
- Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States.
Apply directly at Valency →Create a free account for alerts like thisView Valency immigration profile
This listing is sourced directly from Valency's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.