Senior / Lead Backend Engineer

General Intuition; Northern, New York (KY, NY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

General Intuition is seeking a seasoned backend engineer to shape scalable, low-latency systems powering Medal’s real-time features and data pipelines. You will design APIs, drive backend architecture, and mentor engineers across product, infra, and data teams.

The role emphasizes production-grade craftsmanship, security, and scalable cloud infrastructure. You will work on a tech stack spanning Java, microservices, RESTful APIs, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis/RabbitMQ, and modern CI/CD and IaC tooling,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in Java and building scalable microservices.
• Deep understanding of RESTful API design and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build highly scalable, low-latency backend systems.
• Design critical APIs and evolve infrastructure to support millions of users.
• Mentor other engineers and drive cross-team technical decisions.
• Collaborate with product and infra teams to deliver robust software.

Skills

Backend engineering

Java

Microservices

REST APIs

Distributed systems

Databases

Cloud (GCP/AWS)

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

System design

Security best practices

Leadership

Redis/RabbitMQ

Tools

Terraform

Salt

GitHub Actions

CircleCI

Job description

About the Company

General Intuition is the frontier lab for acting in space and time. We build large action models and world models that can perceive, predict, and act across virtual and physical environments. General Intuition builds on the strength of Medal, the world's largest and fastest-growing platform for gaming clips, where millions of gamers capture, share, and discover new games every year. We recently raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation led by Khosla Ventures with participation from General Catalyst, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos, to discover the next generation of real-world intelligence.

The Role

Medal's backend powers everything from real-time in-app communications and storage of billions of user-generated clips to our ML-based feed and social features. You'll work closely with product, infra, and data teams to architect and build highly scalable, low-latency systems, helping design critical APIs, evolving our backend infrastructure, mentoring other engineers, and driving technical decisions that impact millions of users.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant time in production environments

• Strong proficiency in Java and hands-on experience building scalable microservices

• Deep understanding of RESTful API design and distributed systems

• Relational databases: Experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL, including performance tuning and schema design

• Experience building systems that handle thousands of requests per second

• Comfort with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS preferred), CI/CD, and infrastructure as code

• Strong grasp of system design, architectural patterns, and security best practices

• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive cross-team projects

• Bonus: Redis, RabbitMQ, or other message brokers and caching systems; SRE/DevOps or DevSecOps experience

Our Stack

Electron, React, Redux, Styled Components & other modern web-based technologies
C# and C++ for native Windows recording & more
Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android
Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes for backend
Terraform, Salt, GitHub Actions, CircleCI for IaC and CI/CD