Backend Systems Engineer - Distributed, Reliable & Scalable

Base Power; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Base, America’s next-generation power company, seeks an analytical engineer to own the correctness of distributed systems beyond CRUD backends. You will build infrastructure for experimentation, integrations, and workflow orchestration across direct customers, national homebuilders, and utilities.

You will design and operate systems that handle retries, partial failures, and evolving requirements, ensuring accurate, safe operation at scale.

Qualifications

• Strong systems and API design fundamentals.
• Deep analytical ability and sound technical judgment in ambiguous environments.
• Experience building or operating distributed systems with real correctness requirements.
• Comfort reasoning about idempotency, ordering, state machines, reconciliation, observability, and recovery from failure.
• Ability to separate stakeholder requests from the underlying system or product problem.
• Strong written communication and a high bar for clarity.

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed systems that support critical member and operational workflows.
• Define clear ownership, state, invariants, and failure handling for processes that span multiple services and teams.
• Build systems that remain correct under retries, duplicate events, delayed data, partial failure, concurrent updates, and manual intervention.
• Make tradeoffs between consistency, availability, latency, operational complexity, and member experience.
• Identify process bottlenecks and turn manual or error‑prone work into reliable automation.
• Build infrastructure for experimentation, integrations, and workflow orchestration.
• Stream live and derived data into internal and member‑facing applications.
• Write clearly and align technical decisions across engineering and non‑engineering stakeholders.

Skills

Distributed systems

API design

Observability

Reliability engineering

State management

Job description

Base, America’s next-generation power company, seeks an analytical engineer to own the correctness of distributed systems beyond CRUD backends. You will build infrastructure for experimentation, integrations, and workflow orchestration across direct customers, national homebuilders, and utilities.

You will design and operate systems that handle retries, partial failures, and evolving requirements, ensuring accurate, safe operation at scale.