Senior Backend Engineer — Geothermal R&D & Distributed Systems

Zanskar; Salt Lake City (UT); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid holidays

15 days PTO

Medical, dental and vision coverage

401k

Stock options

Growth opportunities

Job summary

Zanskar is seeking a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and delivery of a distributed compute engine for geothermal exploration. You will work with scientists to scale systems, improve reliability, and implement best practices in cloud-native architectures.

You will collaborate across disciplines, mentor peers, and help advance machine learning and simulation capabilities while maintaining observability and robust CI/CD pipelines. Hybrid role in Salt Lake City headquarters.

Qualifications

• Minimum 7+ years experience in software engineering in a business environment, ideally with a heavy scientific component.
• Experience leading the design and implementation of distributed computing systems.
• Proven technical skills: fault-tolerant, event-driven architectures; scalable cloud workloads; data storage at scale; observability; CI/CD; containerization; IaC; cloud resource management.
• Fluency in Python and SQL are required.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of a reliable distributed compute system supporting scientific research teams.
• Grow and scale an existing system, migrating for reliability and performance.
• Collaborate with geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists and engineers to solve hard problems.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

SQL

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GCP/AWS

Cloud architectures

Tools

Docker

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Pulumi

Job description

Zanskar is seeking a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and delivery of a distributed compute engine for geothermal exploration. You will work with scientists to scale systems, improve reliability, and implement best practices in cloud-native architectures.

You will collaborate across disciplines, mentor peers, and help advance machine learning and simulation capabilities while maintaining observability and robust CI/CD pipelines. Hybrid role in Salt Lake City headquarters.