Senior Software Engineer — Data Modeling (Europe)

People AI; Polska; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Backstory.ai is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Data Modeling team to help complete the Unified Data Platform (UDP) and unify Backstory products under one architecture. You will build and maintain backend services, REST APIs, databases, and big data jobs delivering insights to customers.

Work with Engineering and Product teams to transform activity and CRM data into scalable analytics powering Account 360, Opp 360, search, and Generative AI features.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend experience in an enterprise environment.
• 2+ years programming in Python or Scala.
• Experience with distributed systems and SOA.
• Experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark, Hive, Hadoop, MapReduce).
• Experience with stream processing technologies (Kafka, Samza, Storm).
• Elasticsearch experience is a plus.
• Familiarity with analytical databases and ETL design.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with ownership mindset.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services, REST APIs, databases, and big data pipelines.
• Implement near-real-time streaming vs batch data processing workflows.
• Develop and evolve a query engine for complex cross-deal insights.
• Scale pipelines for growing activity data while managing costs.
• Collaborate with engineering/product teams to translate needs into robust solutions.
• Follow best practices and deliver maintainable, well-monitored code.
• Build internal tooling for self-serve customer support investigations.
• Ensure high-quality alerting, dashboards, tracing, and runbooks in production.

Skills

Backend systems

SOA experience

Analytical

Automation mindset

Ownership

Tools

Spark

Hive

Hadoop

MapReduce

Kafka

Samza

Storm

Elasticsearch

LLMs

NLP

Job description

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Modeling team, you will help us complete the biggest re-architecturing project in Backstory history - Unified Data Platform (UDP) - that unifies all Backstory products under one architecture and improves the data freshness. You will build and maintain the services, REST APIs, databases, and big data jobs that provide Backstory's insights.

Working with the larger Engineering and Product teams, you will take "activity" and "CRM objects" data provided by other teams and make it available for consumption to end users, building higher-level customizable insights that power not only our web application, but also use cases like Account 360, Opp 360, search functionality, and our new Generative AI features.

What you will do:

• Design, build, and maintain backend services, REST APIs, databases, and big data pipelines that power customer-facing insights and analytics.
• Implement and maintain near-real-time stream-based data processing pipelines in collaboration with batch-oriented data refresh workflows.
• Develop and evolve a query engine capable of answering complex, cross-deal/account questions and delivering actionable insights for sales managers and executives.
• Scale data processing and insights generation pipelines to handle growing volumes of activity data (emails, meetings, transcripts, CRM objects) while managing infrastructure costs.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product teams to translate business and customer needs into robust, well-documented technical solutions.
• Follow and promote software development best practices, delivering clean, maintainable, and well-monitored code.
• Build internal tooling to enable customer support teams to investigate and resolve support requests in a self-service manner.
• Ensure high-quality alerting, dashboards, tracing, and runbooks are in place for all production services.

What you will bring:

• 5+ years of professional experience building backend systems in an enterprise environment
• 2+ years of experience programming in Python or Scala
• Experience with distributed systems and service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark, Hive, Hadoop, MapReduce, or similar)
• Experience with stream processing technologies such as Kafka, Apache Samza, or Apache Storm
• Experience with Elasticsearch is a plus
• Experience with LLMs or NLP is a plus
• Familiarity with analytical databases and ETL pipeline design
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a track record of delivering elegant, practical solutions
• Experience taking ownership in an unfamiliar or legacy codebase and incrementally improving it
• Strong inclination toward automation and reducing manual operational toil

About Backstory.ai:

Backstory helps companies understand the state of their revenue business by answering questions that span customer interactions, sales activity, pipeline health, and deal execution. The platform operates over trillions of sales activities, millions of deals, and more than 160 million business contacts, giving customers a unified view of the signals that drive revenue. Companies such as Nvidia, OpenAI, AMD, Red Hat, and Databricks rely on Backstory to surface risks, identify opportunities, and understand what's happening across their business.

Backstory is building AI systems that reason over massive amounts of enterprise data to help business leaders understand what's happening in their business and what to do next. We work at the intersection of large language models, retrieval, evaluation, distributed data systems, and product design, turning billions of signals from across the enterprise into insights people can trust. The underlying challenges span reasoning, search, ranking, data quality, knowledge representation, and operating AI systems against continuously evolving real-world information.

We value ownership highly - the ability to take an idea through all the stages from conception to shipping a product. This reflects throughout our company, but is especially true in engineering. As an engineer at Backstory, you'll be a part of a highly independent and autonomous team. Since we're building out a robust data layer that needs to be presented elegantly to the end-user, you'll be working with a large array of different technologies and fields. Expect lots of interesting challenges.

Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Backstory is backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley's top investors, including ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Akkadian Ventures, and Mubadala Capital. Backstory is listed in the top 20 percent of Inc 5000 companies, is a regular leader in our key categories on G2, and is on the Forbes list of America's Best Startup Employers. For more information, please visit www.backstory.ai.