Senior Software Engineer, Orchestration Platform Software

Front Door Defense; New York (NY); On-site; USD 216,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Retirement benefits

Learning stipend

Generous PTO

Commuter stipend

Job summary

Scale is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the Orchestration Platform across teams in a high‑scale, distributed backend environment.

You will design primitives, services, and developer experiences to enable Scale engineers to author, run, observe, and safely scale durable workflows. Strong backend and platform infrastructure expertise are essential.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience, with a focus on backend, infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating production systems with strong requirements for reliability, availability, and scale.
• Deep familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal, Cadence, AWS Step Functions, Kubernetes, or similar systems.
• Deep familiarity with Kubernetes and containerized production environments, and familiarity with Terraform, Docker.
• Strong knowledge of distributed-systems concepts, including asynchronous execution, retries, idempotency, fault tolerance, state management, and observability.
• A track record of leading technically complex projects from design through rollout and ongoing operation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with platform consumers and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and operation of Scale's core orchestration platform.
• Build durable workflow infrastructure using technologies such as Temporal, Cadence, Kubernetes, and cloud-native systems.
• Define platform primitives and APIs for scheduling, retries, state management, task execution, observability, and workflow lifecycle management.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, data, and application teams to understand workflow needs and turn them into reusable platform capabilities.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, security, and developer experience of services that run critical company workflows.
• Establish technical standards and best practices for distributed workflow development, deployment, testing, and incident response.
• Drive cross-functional technical decisions and communicate platform direction clearly to engineers and stakeholders.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Observability

Tools

Temporal

Cadence

Kubernetes

AWS Step Functions

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Orchestration Platform

Lead design and deployment of Scale's core orchestration platform across teams

Location: San Francisco, California New York, New York

Compensation: $216,000 - 270,000 USD / year

About The Role

Senior Software Engineer

Scale is building reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products help leading enterprises, governments, and frontier AI labs build, deploy, and evaluate AI systems at scale.

The Orchestration Platform is a core technology used across the company to run durable, reliable, and scalable workflows. It powers the complex, long-running processes behind Scale's products - from data and model-evaluation pipelines to operational systems and customer-facing workflows.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will help build and evolve this foundational orchestration platform. You will design the primitives, services, and developer experience that enable teams across Scale to author, operate, observe, and safely scale distributed workflows. This is a high-leverage role for an engineer excited by distributed systems, reliability, and platform infrastructure used by many internal teams.

You will:

• Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and operation of Scale's core orchestration platform.
• Build durable workflow infrastructure using technologies such as Temporal, Cadence, Kubernetes, and cloud-native systems.
• Define platform primitives and APIs for scheduling, retries, state management, task execution, observability, and workflow lifecycle management.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, data, and application teams to understand workflow needs and turn them into reusable platform capabilities.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, security, and developer experience of services that run critical company workflows.
• Establish technical standards and best practices for distributed workflow development, deployment, testing, and incident response.
• Drive cross-functional technical decisions and communicate platform direction clearly to engineers and stakeholders.

Ideally, you have:

• 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience, with a focus on backend, infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating production systems with strong requirements for reliability, availability, and scale.
• Deep familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal, Cadence, AWS Step Functions, Kubernetes, or similar systems.
• Deep familiarity with Kubernetes and containerized production environments, and familiarity with Terraform, Docker.
• Strong knowledge of distributed-systems concepts, including asynchronous execution, retries, idempotency, fault tolerance, state management, and observability.
• A track record of leading technically complex projects from design through rollout and ongoing operation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with platform consumers and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with data warehouses (Snowflake, Firebolt) and data pipeline/ETL tools (Dagster, dbt).
• Experience with authentication/authorization systems (Zanzibar, Authz, etc.)
• Experience scaling products at hyper-growth startups.
• Excitement to work with AI technologies.

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant.

You’ll also receive benefits including, but not limited to:

• comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage
• retirement benefits
• a learning and development stipend
• generous PTO
• commuter stipend

For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is: $216,000 —$270,000 USD

Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at [e-mail]. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.

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