SC Cleared Backend Engineer

SC Cleared Backend Engineer

We’re looking for an early stage engineer who pairs strong software skills with an ambitious, exploratory mindset. This is an exciting opportunity to join the Engineering team at a pivotal moment – we’re a small team within a rapidly scaling organisation, so we each play a role in shaping the company’s engineering culture, practices, and foundations as we grow.

You’ll design and build the distributed systems, storage infrastructure, and platform primitives underpinning the company’s sensor integration product – covering the full backend surface, from stream processing and storage to API design, data pipelines, and service architecture, in a Rust stack with Python at the platform API boundaries. You’ll own meaningful architectural decisions and build systems that scale toward petabyte-scale data storage, reasoning clearly through unfamiliar problem domains under real constraints.

Core Skills

• Core technologies: Rust, with Python at some API boundaries. Kafka, PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB/PostGIS, gRPC/protobuf, and Kubernetes.

Candidates are not expected to have experience with all of these, but adjacent understanding is crucial.

• Systems thinking: Comfortable designing and operating production systems under real constraints – zero-downtime migrations, complex tradeoff analysis, and the kind of pragmatic decision-making that keeps services reliable as requirements shift.
• Software craft: Writes clean, well-structured code with good use of abstractions, namespaces, and interfaces. Opinionated about code review processes and culture.
• Reasoning under uncertainty: Can pick up unfamiliar systems and make sound architectural decisions without a complete picture.
• AI-assisted development: Fluent with LLM-assisted workflows and confident both steering AI tooling toward high-quality output and knowing which problems are better solved by humans.
• Collaboration: Experience or appetite for cross-team communication; comfortable seeking out context independently and building features with limited top-down instruction.

Skills Required

• Experience with Rust
• Experience with Python (API boundaries)
• Experience with Kafka
• Experience with PostgreSQL / TimescaleDB / PostGIS
• Experience with gRPC and protobuf
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Systems thinking; designing and operating production systems under constraints
• Strong software craft: clean, well-structured code and healthy code review practices
• Ability to reason and make architectural decisions under uncertainty
• Familiarity with LLM / AI-assisted development workflows
• Collaboration and cross-team communication; ability to work with limited top-down instruction
• Prior experience with large-scale data infrastructure (distributed storage, sharding, high-throughput pipelines)

Desirable

• Prior experience with large-scale data infrastructure, i.e. distributed storage, sharded databases, high-throughput pipelines. Bonus if you’ve built your own or have experience with the primitives for building your own, e.g. sharding libraries, consistent hashing, data-parallel dataflow computation, etc.