Backend/Infra Engineer

Judgment Labs Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Judgment Labs Inc. is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own the services and APIs that power the data layer. This role involves designing systems to ingest and process agent telemetry efficiently.

The ideal candidate will have at least 6 years of experience, emphasizing API design, distributed systems, and OLAP databases like ClickHouse. Join us to advocate for high-quality engineering practices in a dynamic work environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems.
• Strong fundamentals in API design and data modeling.
• Hands-on experience with OLAP/columnar databases.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-throughput backend services that process data at scale.
• Own the API surface for SDKs and dashboards.
• Tune the OLAP layer through schema design and query optimization.

Skills

API design

Data modeling

Distributed systems

Back-end development

ClickHouse

Kafka

Tools

ClickHouse

Presto

Kafka

Spark

Airflow

Job description

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own the services and APIs that power the data layer. You'll design the systems that ingest, evaluate, and serve agent telemetry at scale.

What You'll Do

Design and build high-throughput backend services that ingest and process hundreds of thousands of agent traces per second.

Own the API surface our SDKs and dashboards depend on: define contracts, manage versioning, and keep latency low under real customer load.

Tune our OLAP layer (ClickHouse) through schema design, query optimization, and access-pattern analysis so reads stay fast as data grows to petabyte scale.

Partner with the platform and infra teams on scalability, reliability, and the systems that back our evaluation and monitoring pipelines.

Advocate for a high bar on backend and engineering quality: reliable, efficient, well-documented, testable, and maintainable.

What We're Looking For

6+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems and services.

Strong fundamentals in API design, data modeling, and the trade-offs of distributed systems under real production load.

Hands-on experience with OLAP / columnar databases (ClickHouse, Presto) and a feel for how query patterns map to storage internals.

Comfort across the stack, with the breadth to reason about platform and infra decisions.

Strong communication skills. You write clearly, review well, and make the people around you better.

Nice to Have

Experience scaling pipelines that fan out to LLM APIs and managing the rate-limit, retry, and cost dynamics that come with them.

Familiarity with streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Ray) and ML orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).

Background in embedding / vector search infrastructure or data quality monitoring.

Prior work on observability or developer-facing platform products.