Senior Backend Engineer

Throne, Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Throne, Inc. in Austin, TX is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own major backend and infrastructure problems end-to-end across product APIs, async systems, media/ML indexing pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

This hands-on role requires turning ambiguous problems into concrete architectural plans and leading implementation and production operation. You will work across Go services, Terraform, AWS, and data pipelines to deliver reliable, scalable backend systems for health-focused products.

Qualifications

• 7+ years backend/infrastructure engineering experience with ownership of production systems.
• Strong Go experience building and operating distributed backend systems.
• Experience with protobuf/gRPC and API design.
• Deep PostgreSQL experience including tuning and migrations.
• Robust Terraform and AWS experience (ECS/Fargate, S3, SQS, IAM, Secrets Manager).
• Experience scaling large async or data-processing systems and ML/data workflows.
• Solid observability, capacity planning, incident handling, and cost/performance tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Own backend and infrastructure end-to-end across product APIs, async systems, media/ML pipelines, and cloud infra.
• Design and implement Go services with gRPC, REST, and internal APIs.
• Lead cloud deployments in Terraform on AWS ECS/Fargate, including networking and security.
• Improve observability with tracing, metrics, alerting, and runbooks.
• Drive architecture decisions, code quality, reviews, and rollout safety.

Skills

Go programming

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

Terraform

AWS ECS/Fargate

API design

Observability

Tools

Terraform

AWS

S3

SQS

IAM

Secrets Manager

Databases

Job description

Throne is a continuous tracking device for getting personalized insight about gut health and hydration. Co-founded by John Capodilupo — co-founder and former CTO of WHOOP — we're bringing the rigor of continuous health tracking to two signals that have long been a guessing game. Our north star is to improve health and save lives.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own major backend and infrastructure problems end-to-end across product APIs, async systems, media/ML indexing pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

This is a hands-on, technical ownership role. You will frequently be given an objective rather than a detailed specification and will be expected to understand the problem, determine the right architecture and implementation plan, identify risks and dependencies, execute the work, and operate the resulting system in production.

You should be comfortable being the person who turns “we need this system to handle 50× the workload” into a concrete technical plan and then makes it happen.

Location

What You’ll Own

• End-to-end technical ownership means translating company and product needs into technical requirements, architecture, implementation plans, and production systems without requiring a pre-defined engineering specification.
• Backend architecture across our Go services, including gRPC, grpc-gateway, REST, internal APIs, and shared libraries.
• The indexing and processing pipeline for large media/session workloads: object storage ingest, queueing, worker orchestration, ML inference integration, session indexing, and downstream metric generation.
• Cloud infrastructure and deployments, primarily in Terraform across AWS ECS/Fargate, networking, storage, queues, IAM, secrets, databases, and ML endpoints.
• Performance, reliability, and cost optimization across APIs, worker fleets, databases, queues, storage, and model-serving integrations.
• Database and data-flow design, including schema changes, migrations, concurrency patterns, throughput tuning, and operational safeguards.
• Observability and operational excellence: tracing, metrics, alerting, incident response, runbooks, capacity planning, and failure analysis.
• Engineering process improvements for the backend: design reviews, code reviews, testing strategy, rollout safety, and technical standards.

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of backend/infrastructure engineering experience, including substantial ownership of production systems and at least several examples of leading complex technical work from ambiguous problem statement through deployment and operation.
• Deep Go experience building and operating distributed backend systems.
• Capable of working well with modern LLM tools to scale your work efficiently
• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including query tuning, migrations, transactional design, and high-throughput worker-backed systems.
• Strong Terraform and AWS experience, especially ECS/Fargate, S3, SQS, IAM, networking, Secrets Manager, and managed databases.
• Experience scaling large async or indexing/data-processing systems built on object storage, queues, & worker fleets.
• Experience operating systems that process large files, media pipelines, ML/AI inference workflows, or similar high-volume compute pipelines.
• Strong API design instincts, especially around protobuf/gRPC contracts, service boundaries, and backward compatibility.
• Strong operational discipline: observability, capacity planning, autoscaling, incident handling, and cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Comfort acting as the backend technical lead: making architecture decisions, raising code quality, and improving team execution.

Nice to Have

• Experience with SageMaker, Vertex AI, pgvector/vector search, FFmpeg/media processing, Honeycomb, Sentry, Auth0, River, and GitHub OIDC-based deploy workflows.
• Experience working across both application backend and ML/data platform boundaries.
• Experience inheriting messy systems and making them simpler, more explicit, and easier to operate.

Why This Role Is Different

This is not a narrow CRUD API role. The backend at Throne sits at the intersection of connected devices, high-volume media, ML inference, data processing, and customer-facing health products.

We need someone who can own the full backend surface and, more importantly, follow problems across boundaries. A performance issue might require changes to an API, database schema, worker architecture, inference service, storage strategy, or observability stack. We expect you to identify the root problem, determine the appropriate solution, and drive it through production.