Remote Real-Time Backend Engineer

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible schedule

Professional development assistance

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is an early-stage startup based in Des Moines, Iowa, seeking a backend/distributed systems engineer to build the core of our software platform. You will design the event-driven architecture, API layer, multi-tenant data structures, flight-slot allocation logic, and telemetry comparison engine.

This foundational role emphasizes reliability, uptime, and real-time processing under pressure.

Qualifications

• Experience building backend systems involving real-time data, state management, messaging, or multiple connected services.
• A history of shipping software that had real users or operational consequences.
• Strong ability in at least one backend language such as Go, Java, Kotlin, Rust, C++, C#, Python, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing databases, APIs, and data models for complex applications.
• Ability to think through failure cases and maintain reliability under pressure.
• Ability to explain technical decisions to engineers and leadership.
• Aviation, robotics, telecom, fintech, logistics, or industrial systems experience is helpful.
• Comfortable in a startup environment where requirements evolve.

Responsibilities

• Build the backend services and event-driven architecture powering the platform.
• Process live vehicle data with handling for delayed, duplicated, missing, or out-of-order information.
• Develop conformance logic comparing vehicle movement to routes, altitudes, timing, and boundaries.
• Create the system to assign and manage time- and location-based flight slots.
• Develop secure APIs for vehicles, operator consoles, customers, and external systems.
• Design the data model for multi-tenant operators, vehicles, missions, and customers.
• Build for fault tolerance, recovery, monitoring, and predictable behavior during failures.
• Test critical logic and document system behavior, assumptions, and interfaces.
• Collaborate with the technical lead, frontend engineer, controls engineers, and leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Production experience

Backend development

APIs and data models

Reliability mindset

Clear communication

Startup experience

Aviation/robotics knowledge (plus)

Tools

Go

Java

Rust

C++

Python

Job description

United States Digital Space LLC is an early-stage startup based in Des Moines, Iowa, seeking a backend/distributed systems engineer to build the core of our software platform. You will design the event-driven architecture, API layer, multi-tenant data structures, flight-slot allocation logic, and telemetry comparison engine.

This foundational role emphasizes reliability, uptime, and real-time processing under pressure.