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About the Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in shaping and scaling Circuit's backend systems and infrastructure. You will own complex backend services built primarily in Go and Python, focusing on resilience, scalability, and performance under increasing load. A defining challenge of this team is data scale, driving new architectural demands around database sharding, self-hosted storage, efficient embedding indexes, and safe, high-stakes data migrations. Beyond the data platform, you will ensure agentic functionality can evolve and handle new levels of demand. Our teams operate with a high degree of independence and ownership, expecting engineers to communicate clearly, act with urgency, and fix issues proactively. You will work through ambiguity by framing problems, asking the right questions, and making progress with incomplete information. Curiosity and internal drive are essential, with an expectation to deeply understand systems, customers, and impact.

Responsibilities

Lead design, implementation, and scaling of backend infrastructure and services, primarily in Go.
Own the data platform layer, including designing and executing database sharding and partitioning strategies, evaluating and potentially migrating toward self-hosted Postgres, and building custom index strategies for embedding-heavy workloads.
Design and drive data migration strategies that are safe to run against production systems at scale, with minimal downtime and high confidence.
Ensure backend systems are resilient, observable, and performant under high customer load.
Drive architectural decisions for long-term scalability and maintainability.
Contribute significant code to core backend systems, focusing on efficiency, robustness, and developer velocity.
Establish and promote engineering best practices across the backend team.
Collaborate closely with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver high-quality features.
Mentor and support other engineers, fostering growth and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

Proven track record turning ambiguous problem statements into shipped, reliable backend systems, owning work end-to-end from design through production.
Significant expertise in Go, with deep knowledge of performance optimization, concurrency, and distributed systems.
Deep, hands-on experience managing Postgres in production at scale, including tuning, replication, vacuuming, and operational ownership beyond managed cloud services.
Experience running and operating self-hosted Postgres, including storage optimization and infrastructure-level configuration.
Proven experience designing and executing data migrations and database scaling strategies (sharding, partitioning, tiered storage) in live production environments.
Experience running services at scale, anticipating scalability, reliability, and downstream system impact.
Strong background in service-oriented architecture, microservices, and API design, with a systems-level view of lifecycle costs and long-term maintainability.
Proficiency with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
Hands-on experience designing observable and operable systems, using metrics, logs, traces, testing, and alerts to detect and diagnose issues early (Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
Hands-on experience stepping outside core backend ownership into one or more of infrastructure (cloud, IaC), ML systems (Python), or frontend (React) to solve integration problems, unblock teams, and directly implement features end-to-end when that is the fastest path to impact.
Team first, low ego; optimizes for team and company outcomes over individual wins, challenges ideas with data and reasoning, shares context early, and commits fully once decisions are made.
Strong sense of ownership; takes responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks, acts with urgency without waiting to be asked, and leaves systems better than they found them.
Bias to action and learning; ships frequently, tests high-impact assumptions early, and uses small, safe-to-fail experiments to learn from real feedback.
Customer-impact focused; cares deeply about how reliability, latency, and correctness shape real-world user outcomes and trust.
Intrinsically motivated; maintains momentum without external pressure and pushes work through ambiguity to real outcomes.
Curious and continuously learning; seeks deep understanding of the product, systems, and users, and challenges assumptions in pursuit of better results.

Skills

Go
Python
Postgres
Docker
Kubernetes
Datadog
Prometheus
OpenTelemetry
React

Experience Level

Staff Backend Engineer
Senior backend engineer

Benefits

Competitive compensation
Meaningful equity
Employer-paid benefits
Flexible PTO
Access to the latest AI tools

About the Company

Circuit is the AI execution layer for the physical economy.
Industrial and manufacturing enterprises run on expertise: the hard-won knowledge of how complex products are engineered, configured, sold, and supported.
Circuit puts expert judgment in everyone's hands.
Circuit is built by operators.
Our leadership team has built and scaled real industrial companies, and we are already live in production with category-leading manufacturers.
We are building the layer that runs the last mile of how the physical economy executes.

Equal Opportunity

We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity at our company.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.