Principal Backend Engineer – AI Discovery Platform

Edison Scientific; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Equity

Parental leave

Mental health support

Wellness stipend

Pet care stipend

Commuter benefits

401(k) matching

Team events

Office in SF

Job summary

Edison Scientific is seeking a Principal Member of Technical Staff (Full-stack, Backend-Focused, Python) to build and support our core platform that automates scientific discovery. You will design backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, while contributing to user-facing features for accessibility and intuition.

This on-site role in San Francisco's Dogpatch joins the Product Engineering team, collaborating with frontend engineers, designers, and researchers to deliver end-to-end functionality.

Qualifications

• Typically 10+ years of software engineering experience with exposure to backend and frontend.
• Strong experience in at least one backend language (Python, Node.js) with emphasis on Python.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs (FastAPI, REST; GraphQL a plus).
• Familiarity with frontend frameworks (React, Next.js, etc.) and modern web practices.
• Working knowledge of relational or document databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB).
• Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerized environments (Docker; Kubernetes a plus).
• Experience with version control, CI/CD pipelines, and basic automated testing.
• Curiosity, growth mindset, and ability to learn in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical architecture for the product platform.
• Lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of backend services, APIs, and databases.
• Drive engineering standards, reliability, and scalability across the organization.
• Partner with engineering leadership on technical strategy and roadmap planning.
• Mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering practices across teams.
• Build and extend data pipelines for AI agents and research workflows.
• Implement monitoring, observability, and automated testing for reliability.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and research teams to ship AI-driven features.
• Grow as a software engineer within a highly collaborative AI-for-science context.

Skills

Backend development

Python

API design

Frontend basics

CI/CD

Testing

Observability

Tools

FastAPI

REST

GraphQL

PostgreSQL

MySQL

MongoDB

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Job description

Edison Scientific is seeking a Principal Member of Technical Staff (Full-stack, Backend-Focused, Python) to build and support our core platform that automates scientific discovery. You will design backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, while contributing to user-facing features for accessibility and intuition.

This on-site role in San Francisco's Dogpatch joins the Product Engineering team, collaborating with frontend engineers, designers, and researchers to deliver end-to-end functionality.