Senior Backend Engineer - Platform

Piramidal (YC W24); New York (NY); On-site; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Piramidal is seeking a backend engineer in New York to build and scale the infrastructure behind a real-time neural monitoring platform. The role demands ownership of production backend systems and collaboration with ML and security teams.

The position is full-time, based in the New York office (5 days a week) with travel to client sites and US work authorization required. You will shape data models, APIs, and observability to support hospital-grade reliability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of building and operating backend systems in production.
• Own a problem from an ambiguous start to a running, monitored service, and explain decisions verbally and in writing.
• Real experience with event-driven or stream-processing systems: partitioning, checkpointing, backpressure, at-least-once delivery.
• Strong Python, including concurrency (threads vs. processes, asyncio) and testing.
• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration, preferably using Kubernetes.
• Solid relational database skills, from schema design to query performance.

Responsibilities

• Build and run Python and Go services that consume, transform, and serve real-time streams of neurological data.
• Design, maintain, and improve data models, ingestion pipelines and retention for high frequency time series data, from raw neurological data, to all time series derived from it.
• Build and extend the APIs behind clinical workflows.
• Work with ML engineers to take models from research to production inference, and keep them running there.
• Make the platform observable and dependable: metrics, alerting, capacity planning, and incident follow-up.
• Help build software to the standards of a regulated medical device, including cybersecurity, traceability and change control.

Skills

Python

Go

Concurrency

Testing

Kubernetes

Relational databases

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Piramidal is looking for a backend engineer to help build and scale the infrastructure behind our real time neural monitoring platform. You'll work on hard problems: high throughput streaming, real-time analytics, and hospital grade reliability. You’re a chronic optimist and relentlessly resourceful.

This is a full-time role based in our New York office (5 days a week), with required travel to client sites. Candidates must have US work authorization.

In this role you will

• Build and run Python and Go services that consume, transform, and serve real-time streams of neurological data.
• Design, maintain, and improve data models, ingestion pipelines and retention for high frequency time series data, from raw neurological data, to all time series derived from it.
• Build and extend the APIs behind clinical workflows.
• Work with ML engineers to take models from research to production inference, and keep them running there.
• Make the platform observable and dependable: metrics, alerting, capacity planning, and incident follow-up.
• Help build software to the standards of a regulated medical device, including cybersecurity, traceability and change control.

Your background looks something like

• 5+ years of building and operating backend systems in production
• You can own a problem from an ambiguous start to a running, monitored service, and you can explain your decisions verbally and in writing.
• Real experience with event-driven or stream-processing systems: partitioning, checkpointing, backpressure, and at‑least-once delivery.
• Strong Python, including concurrency (threads vs. processes, asyncio) and testing.
• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration, preferably using kubernetes.
• Solid relational database skills, from schema design to query performance.

Nice to have

• Go, especially for networked or low-latency services.
• Azure: Event Hubs, Service Bus, Web PubSub, Blob Storage, AKS.
• Apache Arrow, Parquet or other columnar formats.
• Video streaming, storage, and processing.
• Systems where sub‑second latency matters.
• Data engineering or warehousing at scale.
• Model serving (PyTorch)
• Work in healthcare or other regulated software.

About Us

We’ve built the first‑of‑its‑kind foundation model for brainwave data. Our goal is Intelligence Amplification (IA) by means of creating neural decoders that enable interactions with the language of neurons. Powered by our SOTA foundation model, our first product detects in real time abnormalities in the brains of ICU patients.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary range: $250,000 – $300,000, depending on experience and skills.
• Meaningful equity plan.
• Comprehensive health coverage, including premium medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Daily lunch budget.
• Monthly gym subscription.

Interview Process

• Initial Screen (30 min): Discussion to ensure timelines, experience, and expectations align.
• Technical Screen (1 hour): via Google Meet
• Final Round (in person):
• Coding Problem (1 hour)
• System Design (1 hour)
• Product Session (1 hour)
• Questions (20 minutes)