Software Engineer - Backend

The Role

Specter is hiring a backend engineer to design and scale the distributed systems that power our cloud-based perception platform. You'll build the services, data pipelines, and infrastructure that ingest, process, and serve real-time video, sensor, and computer vision data at scale. This role sits at the foundation of Specter's product stack-owning the reliability, performance, and scalability of the backend systems that everything else is built on.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement scalable backend services and data pipelines for high-throughput, real-time streams of video, sensor, and detection data.
• Design and optimize distributed storage and compute systems for low-latency data access and high availability.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform to manage cloud resources in AWS.
• Build and operate Kubernetes-based deployments with a focus on reliability, observability, and efficient resource utilization.
• Design relational and time-series data models in PostgreSQL, optimizing for ingestion throughput and query performance.
• Develop event-driven architectures using Kafka, SQS, or similar messaging systems.
• Collaborate with perception and full-stack teams to define API contracts and data flow designs across real-time and analytical workloads.
• Own the reliability of core backend systems, including on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.

Qualifications

• Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Deep proficiency in Python, Go, or Node.js with a solid foundation in systems-level thinking.
• Extensive experience with AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, SQS, Lambda, VPC networking).
• Hands-on experience with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills-schema design, query optimization, and migration strategies.
• Experience with containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD automation.
• Familiarity with event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent).
• Solid understanding of networking, security, and identity management in cloud environments.
• Interest in physical AI, IoT, or large-scale distributed sensing systems.