Senior Backend Engineer
Summary
A Senior Backend Engineer at Masthead Data designs and operates cloud-native systems (Kotlin/Spring Boot on GKE) processing BigQuery audit logs and metadata to detect data issues and optimize costs for enterprise clients, while upholding zero-data-access security principles.
About Masthead Data
Masthead Data is a data observability and BigQuery cost optimization platform built on a zero-data-access architecture — we operate exclusively on audit logs and metadata, and never touch our customers' underlying data. That constraint is our core differentiator and shapes every engineering decision we make. We work with enterprise customers who manage millions of tables and care deeply about security, auditability, and doing more with less. We uncover hidden data issues in real-time and drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly savings.
The Role
We're looking for a full-time remote Senior Backend Engineer to own significant parts of our platform end to end — from architecture through production. You'll work on systems that process large volumes of audit-log and metadata events, detect issues in production data environments, power our FinOps recommendations, and integrate deeply with GCP. This is a high-ownership role with real influence over technical direction.
What you'll do
Design, build, and operate backend services in Kotlin (Spring Boot) running on GKE
Work across our data pipeline: BigQuery, Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, and GCP-native tooling
Build and refine the systems behind our cost optimization and observability features
Manage infrastructure as code with Terraform, and help evolve our multi-tenant, per-customer project architecture
Uphold and extend our zero-data-access security model — least-privilege access, granular controls
Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews, and the technical growth of the team
What we're looking for
Strong backend experience with Kotlin (or Java with a genuine willingness to move to Kotlin) and Spring Boot
Hands-on experience running production workloads on Kubernetes, ideally GKE
Ownership: you can take an ambiguous problem and drive it to a production result
Solid grounding in GCP — BigQuery, Pub/Sub, IAM, and related services
Comfort with infrastructure as code, particularly Terraform
Experience with PostgreSQL and designing data-intensive backend systems
A security-conscious mindset and appreciation for operating within tight data-access constraints
Nice to have
Experience with data observability, FinOps, or cloud cost optimization
Familiarity with multi-tenant SaaS architecture and cross-tenant isolation patterns
Background working with enterprise customers and their security requirements
Why Masthead Data
You'll join a small, senior team solving genuinely hard problems where the architectural constraints are the interesting part. Your work will be visible to enterprise customers from day one, and you'll have room to shape both the product and how we build it.