Senior Backend Engineer
Summary
Senior/founding backend engineer at Zipher, which builds an autonomous execution layer for cloud data and AI workloads. You'll architect and scale distributed, high-throughput backend services that make real-time multi-cloud infrastructure decisions, primarily using Python or Go and AWS services like EMR, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and Kubernetes.
Zipher is building the Autonomous Execution Layer for cloud data and AI workloads. Backed by $50M in funding, we dynamically orchestrate clusters, predict bottlenecks, and auto-heal infrastructure in real time — with zero human intervention. Our platform runs in production at global enterprise customers, including Fortune 500 companies, delivering mission-critical resilience and sub-second optimization.
We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to build the systems behind Zipher’s autonomous execution engine. You will own core infrastructure that turns high-volume telemetry and changing cloud conditions into reliable, real-time decisions across production data and AI workloads.
What You’ll Do
- Architect and scale the core backend services that power real-time workload orchestration, optimization, and self-healing
- Build resilient, high-throughput systems for processing distributed state, event streams, and production telemetry at scale
- Design infrastructure that makes autonomous decisions observable, explainable, and safe for enterprise engineering teams
- Partner closely with data, ML, and platform engineers to bring optimization models and control loops into reliable production systems
- Drive architectural decisions, raise the engineering bar, and own services from design through deployment, observability, and incident response
What We Offer
- A chance to build the core execution engine for a new category of autonomous data platform
- High ownership from day one: real architectural influence, direct exposure to founders, and responsibility for mission-critical systems
- Technical, high-velocity team that values curiosity, speed, and engineering craftsmanship
- Top-of-market compensation and meaningful equity
Ready to build the infrastructure that lets data and AI workloads run autonomously? Hit Apply.
Requirements
What You’ll Bring
- 6+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of production-grade distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, or core product architecture
- Strong production experience with Python or Go, and a track record of designing robust APIs, services, and asynchronous workflows
- Deep hands-on experience operating cloud-native systems on AWS at scale, including EMR, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Lambda, S3, or API Gateway
- Experience with distributed computing or infrastructure engines, such as Kubernetes, Spark, high-throughput schedulers, streaming platforms, or message brokers
- A high-agency, engineering-first mindset: you enjoy ambiguous, high-leverage problems and take responsibility for reliability, performance, and quality
Nice to Have
- Experience with large-scale compute and data platforms, including Spark, Databricks, Trino, Flink, or Snowflake
- Experience building infrastructure for AI/ML workloads, MLOps/AIOps systems, or production model-serving environments
- Familiarity with cloud cost optimization, FinOps, workload scheduling, or efficiency optimization at scale
- Experience in an elite IDF technology unit (e.g. 8200, Mamram, Matzpen) or another high-performance engineering environment