Senior Software Engineer — Data Modeling (Europe)

Backstory; Town of Poland (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Backstory is building a unified data platform to centralize data across products. Senior Software Engineer on the Data Modeling team will design and maintain backend services, REST APIs, and big data pipelines to deliver insights from emails, meetings, transcripts, and CRM data.

You will scale processing, collaborate across teams, and promote robust observability and automation. The role emphasizes ownership in an autonomous team, modern data stack experience, and delivering practical,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend experience in an enterprise environment.
• 2+ years coding in Python or Scala.
• Experience with distributed systems and SOA architecture.
• Experience with large-scale data processing (Spark, Hadoop, Hive, MapReduce).
• Experience with stream processing tech (Kafka, Samza, Storm).
• Familiarity with analytical databases and ETL design.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with practical solutions.
• Ability to own code in unfamiliar or legacy bases and improve it incrementally.
• Bias toward automation and reducing manual toil.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services, REST APIs, databases, and big data pipelines.
• Implement near-real-time streaming pipelines alongside batch workflows.
• Develop a query engine for cross-deal insights for sales leadership.
• Scale data processing pipelines while managing infra costs.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate needs into robust tech solutions.
• Promote best practices and deliver maintainable, well-documented code.
• Build internal tooling to enable self-service support.
• Ensure high-quality alerting, dashboards, tracing, and runbooks for production.

Skills

Backend development

Python/Scala

Distributed systems

SOA

Big data

NLP/LLMs

ETL design

Automation

Tools

Spark

Hive

Hadoop

MapReduce

Kafka

Apache Samza

Apache Storm

Elasticsearch

Job description

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Modeling team, you will help us complete the biggest re-architecturing project in Backstory history - Unified Data Platform (UDP) - that unifies all Backstory products under one architecture and improves the data freshness. You will build and maintain the services, REST APIs, databases, and big data jobs that provide Backstory’s insights.

What you will do:

• Design, build, and maintain backend services, REST APIs, databases, and big data pipelines that power customer-facing insights and analytics
• Implement and maintain near-real-time stream-based data processing pipelines in collaboration with batch-oriented data refresh workflows
• Develop and evolve a query engine capable of answering complex, cross-deal/account questions and delivering actionable insights for sales managers and executives
• Scale data processing and insights generation pipelines to handle growing volumes of activity data (emails, meetings, transcripts, CRM objects) while managing infrastructure costs
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product teams to translate business and customer needs into robust, well-documented technical solutions
• Follow and promote software development best practices, delivering clean, maintainable, and well-monitored code
• Build internal tooling to enable customer support teams to investigate and resolve support requests in a self-service manner
• Ensure high-quality alerting, dashboards, tracing, and runbooks are in place for all production services

What you will bring:

• 5+ years of professional experience building backend systems in an enterprise environment
• 2+ years of experience programming in Python or Scala
• Experience with distributed systems and service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark, Hive, Hadoop, MapReduce, or similar)
• Experience with stream processing technologies such as Kafka, Apache Samza, or Apache Storm
• Experience with Elasticsearch is a plus
• Experience with LLMs or NLP is a plus
• Familiarity with analytical databases and ETL pipeline design
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a track record of delivering elegant, practical solutions
• Experience taking ownership in an unfamiliar or legacy codebase and incrementally improving it
• Strong inclination toward automation and reducing manual operational toil

About Backstory.ai:

Backstory helps companies understand the state of their revenue business by answering questions that span customer interactions, sales activity, pipeline health, and deal execution. The platform operates over trillions of sales activities, millions of deals, and more than 160 million business contacts, giving customers a unified view of the signals that drive revenue. Companies such as Nvidia, OpenAI, AMD, Red Hat, and Databricks rely on Backstory to surface risks, identify opportunities, and understand what's happening across their business. Backstory is building AI systems that reason over massive amounts of enterprise data to help business leaders understand what's happening in their business and what to do next. We work at the intersection of large language models, retrieval, evaluation, distributed data systems, and product design, turning billions of signals from across the enterprise into insights people can trust. The underlying challenges span reasoning, search, ranking, data quality, knowledge representation, and operating AI systems against continuously evolving real-world information. We value ownership highly — the ability to take an idea through all the stages from conception to shipping a product. This reflects throughout our company, but is especially true in engineering. As an engineer at Backstory, you'll be a part of a highly independent and autonomous team. Since we're building out a robust data layer that needs to be presented elegantly to the end-user, you'll be working with a large array of different technologies and fields. Expect lots of interesting challenges. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Backstory is backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley’s top investors, including ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Akkadian Ventures, and Mubadala Capital. Backstory is listed in the top 20 percent of Inc 5000 companies, is a regular leader in our key categories on G2, and is on the Forbes list of America’s Best Startup Employers. For more information, please visit www.backstory.ai.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.