Senior Backend Data Platform Architect

beaconbiosignals; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon Biosignals is building a Datastore team that designs and scales backend data infrastructure for clinical and research use. The role emphasizes PostgreSQL schemas, Kafka pipelines, and GraphQL APIs, with leadership in system design and cross-team collaboration to unlock new data workflows.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to RFCs, and drive architectural decisions that improve performance, reliability, and maintainability across Beacon's data platform.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience, including at least 3 years focused on data platforms and backend infrastructure for data-centric applications: transactional systems, event pipelines, and the APIs that serve them
• Highly proficient in at least one technical area relevant to this work: data modeling, distributed systems, API design, or database engineering, with the depth that others on a team come to you for
• Strong proficiency in SQL, with production experience working with PostgreSQL as an application database; you write and tune queries fluently and are comfortable reasoning about schema design, indexes, and query plans
• Hands-on experience with data streaming and event processing, using Kafka (our event bus) or an equivalent such as RabbitMQ, Pulsar, or a cloud-based equivalent like Amazon Kinesis
• Proficiency in Julia or Python; Julia is a core Datastore language, and experience with Julia is a strong plus, but not required - we welcome candidates eager to learn it!
• Experience with GraphQL and TypeScript/JavaScript (Node.js) - GraphQL is the Datastore's primary interface
• Experience deploying and operating services in containerized environments, with familiarity in Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and/or Helm
• A track record of mentoring engineers and improving how a team works - practices, tooling, test coverage

Responsibilities

• Lead design and architecture for complex projects and systems within the Datastore, weighing implementation trade-offs with engineering principles and backing your decisions with data rather than preference
• Partner with product managers, scientific and clinical stakeholders, and other development and support teams to translate their requirements into new integrations, services, and solutions for scaling Beacon's data platform - contributing to broader product and technical decisions, not simply implementing them
• Debug and profile ambiguous problems that cross system boundaries, including codebases beyond the Datastore's purview, and you leave what you touch better than you found it - structure, test coverage, tooling
• Peers look to your work as an example: you implement features with attention to detail, demonstrating product awareness and high standards for data integrity, design soundness, and maintainability across the lifespan of the system
• You draft RFCs to lead complex feature discovery and technical design phases, soliciting input and helping your team align on decisions to guide development
• You plan your own work and contribute to planning the team's, making reasoned trade-offs between speed, generalizability, and technical debt, and accounting for the needs of multiple stakeholder teams
• You teach and mentor other engineers regularly, give feedback that people act on, and are sought out for it. You may act as tech lead on a project or as the coordination point for engineering practice within the team
• You leverage feedback from internal stakeholders and external partners to improve operational robustness and ease of use of the Datastore and its services via new documentation, tools, and dashboards

Skills

Backend development

Data platforms

API design

Database engineering

SQL

Kafka

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Terraform

Code mentoring

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Pulsar

Julia

Python

TypeScript

JavaScript

Node.js

Terraform

Helm

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Beacon Biosignals is building a Datastore team that designs and scales backend data infrastructure for clinical and research use. The role emphasizes PostgreSQL schemas, Kafka pipelines, and GraphQL APIs, with leadership in system design and cross-team collaboration to unlock new data workflows.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to RFCs, and drive architectural decisions that improve performance, reliability, and maintainability across Beacon's data platform.