Senior Backend Engineer - Go & Scalable Data Platform

Getcircuit; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Employer-paid benefits

Flexible PTO

Access to latest AI tools

Job summary

Circuit is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to design and scale backend services, primarily in Go, with an emphasis on resilience and performance under high load. You’ll own the data platform layer, including sharding, self-hosted Postgres strategies, and embedding-heavy workloads, while guiding architecture for long-term scalability.

You'll collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams and mentor peers, balancing speed with quality across distributed systems and observability tooling.

Qualifications

• Proven track record turning ambigous problem statements into shipped, reliable backend systems.
• Significant expertise in Go, with deep knowledge of performance optimization and concurrency.
• Deep, hands-on experience managing Postgres in production at scale, including tuning and replication.
• Experience running and operating self-hosted Postgres and storage optimization.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, implementation, and scaling of backend infrastructure and services, primarily in Go.
• Own the data platform layer — design and execute database sharding and partitioning strategies.
• Design and drive data migration strategies that are safe to run against production systems at scale.
• Ensure backend systems are resilient, observable, and performant under high customer load.
• Drive architectural decisions for long-term scalability and maintainability.
• Contribute significant code to core backend systems, focusing on efficiency and velocity.
• Establish and promote engineering best practices across the backend team.
• Collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver high-quality features.
• Mentor and support other engineers.

Skills

Go

PostgreSQL

Distributed Systems

Docker

Kubernetes

Data Migrations

API Design

Observability

Mentoring

Performance

Tools

Datadog

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Circuit is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to design and scale backend services, primarily in Go, with an emphasis on resilience and performance under high load. You’ll own the data platform layer, including sharding, self-hosted Postgres strategies, and embedding-heavy workloads, while guiding architecture for long-term scalability.

You'll collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams and mentor peers, balancing speed with quality across distributed systems and observability tooling.