Senior Backend & Data Platform Engineer

Orbit; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 215,000; Full time

Job summary

Orbit is building a wearable brain-computer interface and research platform. We seek an experienced backend engineer to shape the data foundation, architecture, and services that connect neural recordings to scientific discovery.

You will influence tech choices, design data models, and build scalable APIs for ingesting, storing, and retrieving recordings. You will design authentication flows, collaborate with desktop engineers on upload workflows, and help establish testing, CI/CD, and

Qualifications

• Must have a degree in computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, or related field and at least five years of experience.
• Experienced designing and operating backend services with depth in a modern production language.
• Comfortable with data modeling, relational DB design, SQL, APIs, and cloud object storage.
• Familiar with authentication, authorization, and credential management across application boundaries.
• Able to design robust data flows and reason about consistency between services, stored data, and metadata.
• Interested in shaping a greenfield system, making tradeoffs explicit, and designing for a small team to build and evolve.
• Enjoy collaborating with data producers and consumers.

Responsibilities

• Shape the backend architecture and select technologies for product, researchers, and engineering team.
• Design the data model and relational database schema, including recording identity, configuration, provenance, relationships, indexing, and migrations.
• Build APIs and services for ingesting, storing, discovering, and retrieving recordings and metadata.
• Design authentication, authorization, and credential flows for secure, straightforward access.
• Collaborate with desktop engineers on robust upload and synchronization workflows that preserve recording integrity.
• Develop scientific data storage with performance, scalability, and cost in mind.
• Establish automated testing, CI/CD, and observability to keep the platform reliable and evolvable.

Skills

Backend design

Data modeling

Relational DB design

SQL

APIs

Cloud object storage

Authentication & authorization

Data flows

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE/CE

Tools

PostgreSQL

Supabase

MySQL

Firebase

Appwrite

AWS

Google Cloud

Azure

Terraform

Pulumi

Docker

Job description

Orbit is building a wearable brain-computer interface and research platform. We seek an experienced backend engineer to shape the data foundation, architecture, and services that connect neural recordings to scientific discovery.

You will influence tech choices, design data models, and build scalable APIs for ingesting, storing, and retrieving recordings. You will design authentication flows, collaborate with desktop engineers on upload workflows, and help establish testing, CI/CD, and