Senior Cloud & Backend Software Engineer

Orbit; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 215,000; Full time

Job summary

Orbit is building a wearable brain-computer interface and research platform. We seek an experienced backend engineer to shape the data foundation, architecture, and services that connect neural recordings to scientific discovery.

You will influence tech choices, design data models, and build scalable APIs for ingesting, storing, and retrieving recordings. You will design authentication flows, collaborate with desktop engineers on upload workflows, and help establish testing, CI/CD, and

Qualifications

• Must have a degree in computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, or related field and at least five years of experience.
• Experienced designing and operating backend services with depth in a modern production language.
• Comfortable with data modeling, relational DB design, SQL, APIs, and cloud object storage.
• Familiar with authentication, authorization, and credential management across application boundaries.
• Able to design robust data flows and reason about consistency between services, stored data, and metadata.
• Interested in shaping a greenfield system, making tradeoffs explicit, and designing for a small team to build and evolve.
• Enjoy collaborating with data producers and consumers.

Responsibilities

• Shape the backend architecture and select technologies for product, researchers, and engineering team.
• Design the data model and relational database schema, including recording identity, configuration, provenance, relationships, indexing, and migrations.
• Build APIs and services for ingesting, storing, discovering, and retrieving recordings and metadata.
• Design authentication, authorization, and credential flows for secure, straightforward access.
• Collaborate with desktop engineers on robust upload and synchronization workflows that preserve recording integrity.
• Develop scientific data storage with performance, scalability, and cost in mind.
• Establish automated testing, CI/CD, and observability to keep the platform reliable and evolvable.

Skills

Backend design

Data modeling

Relational DB design

SQL

APIs

Cloud object storage

Authentication & authorization

Data flows

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE/CE

Tools

PostgreSQL

Supabase

MySQL

Firebase

Appwrite

AWS

Google Cloud

Azure

Terraform

Pulumi

Docker

Job description

About Orbit

We're a team of engineers, neuroscientists, and designers working to deepen our understanding of the human brain. We're building a wearable brain-computer interface and models that decode emotion, with the goal of putting human experience and wellbeing at the center of technology. Our work spans neural sensors, embedded systems, scientific software, and AI.

About Orbit

We're a team of engineers, neuroscientists, and designers working to deepen our understanding of the human brain. We're building a wearable brain-computer interface and models that decode emotion, with the goal of putting human experience and wellbeing at the center of technology. Our work spans neural sensors, embedded systems, scientific software, and AI.

We're venture funded, with backing from founders and executives across AI, neurotechnology, consumer hardware, and pharmaceuticals, including Google, Hugging Face, Apple, Stability, Microsoft, and Dropbox.

About The Role

Build the data foundation that connects neural recordings to scientific discovery. This is a greenfield opportunity to shape our backend architecture, data model, database design, and the services that make recordings accessible and useful.

You'll have real influence over technology choices and how the platform grows. Leading candidates include Supabase and PostgreSQL, with S3-compatible object storage and Zarr v3 for scientific arrays. We favor focused services and managed infrastructure that give a small team room to build ambitious capabilities.

You will

• Shape the backend architecture and select technologies around the needs of our product, researchers, and engineering team.
• Design the data model and relational database schema, including recording identity, configuration, provenance, relationships, indexing, and schema migrations.
• Build APIs and services for ingesting, storing, discovering, and retrieving recordings and their metadata.
• Design authentication, authorization, and credential flows that make access secure and straightforward.
• Collaborate with desktop engineers on robust upload and synchronization workflows that preserve recording integrity.
• Develop scientific data storage around useful access patterns, balancing performance, scalability, and cost.
• Establish automated testing, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and observability that keep the platform reliable and easy to evolve.

You are

• An engineer with a degree in computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, or a related field, and at least five years of relevant professional experience.
• Experienced designing and operating backend services, with depth in a modern production language.
• Comfortable with data modeling, relational database design, SQL, APIs, and cloud object storage.
• Familiar with authentication, authorization, and credential management across application boundaries.
• Able to design robust data flows and reason about consistency between services, stored data, and metadata.
• Interested in shaping a greenfield system, making tradeoffs explicit, and choosing designs a small team can build and evolve.
• Someone who enjoys collaborating with the people producing and consuming the data.

You might also

• Have experience with Supabase or PostgreSQL row-level security (RLS), or bring related database and managed-backend experience with MySQL, Firebase, or Appwrite.
• Have built REST or GraphQL APIs, serverless functions, event-driven services, or data ingestion pipelines on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.
• Have worked with Zarr, HDF5, Apache Arrow, Parquet, or scientific datasets, and understand how storage formats support different access patterns.
• Know object storage such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage, resumable uploads, or identity and access patterns using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, or JWTs.
• Have supported native desktop or connected-device clients, or built asynchronous data flows using MQTT, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or comparable messaging technologies.
• Have used infrastructure as code with Terraform or Pulumi, container tools such as Docker, or observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Bring experience with data provenance, reproducible processing, or datasets used in model development.

We're looking for a strong foundation and the ability to grow. You don't need experience with every technology we use, and the "You might also" section is entirely optional. If the core work feels like a good match but some details are new to you, we'd like to hear from you. Prior neuroscience or brain-computer interface experience isn't expected.

How we work

We're a small, high-performance team with quick feedback loops and room to experiment. You'll work directly with people across engineering, neuroscience, and design, understand why your work matters, and have real influence over how we build.

We work with modern software and hardware stacks and a Linux-forward development environment. We use principled engineering and thoughtful design to explore, build and test, aided by modern agentic workflows. You'll have room to shape both the product and the way we create it.

Compensation Range: $185K - $215K