Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

Zanskar; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid holidays

15 days PTO

Medical, dental and vision coverage

401k

Stock options

Growth opportunities

Job summary

Zanskar is seeking a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and delivery of a distributed compute engine for geothermal exploration. You will work with scientists to scale systems, improve reliability, and implement best practices in cloud-native architectures.

You will collaborate across disciplines, mentor peers, and help advance machine learning and simulation capabilities while maintaining observability and robust CI/CD pipelines. Hybrid role in Salt Lake City headquarters.

Qualifications

• Minimum 7+ years experience in software engineering in a business environment, ideally with a heavy scientific component.
• Experience leading the design and implementation of distributed computing systems.
• Proven technical skills: fault-tolerant, event-driven architectures; scalable cloud workloads; data storage at scale; observability; CI/CD; containerization; IaC; cloud resource management.
• Fluency in Python and SQL are required.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of a reliable distributed compute system supporting scientific research teams.
• Grow and scale an existing system, migrating for reliability and performance.
• Collaborate with geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists and engineers to solve hard problems.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

SQL

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GCP/AWS

Cloud architectures

Tools

Docker

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Pulumi

Job description

Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

Role Overview

Title:Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

Hours: Full-Time, Salaried

Location: Salt Lake City, UT, Hybrid

Benefits Eligible: Yes

Manager: Head of Reservoir R&D

Why we exist

Geothermal energy is the most abundant renewable energy source in the world. There is 2,300 times more energy in geothermal heat in the ground than in oil, gas, coal, and methane combined. However, historically it’s been hard to find and expensive to develop. At Zanskar, we’re using better technology to find and develop new geothermal resources in order to make geothermal a cheap and vital contributor to a carbon-free electrical grid. We are revolutionizing the exploration process, setting new industry standards for discovery rates and finding new prospects at an unprecedented scale. To reduce risk and improve outcomes, we rely on novel software and machine learning modeling.

Who you are

The Senior/Staff Backend Engineer will play a critical role developing and maintaining Zanskar’s next-generation multi-physics well-targeting engine. A successful candidate will:

• Lead - you will be a trusted leader who can both design and deliver a reliable distributed compute system that meets the ongoing needs of our scientific research teams.
• Learn - you will be entering a team with an existing system in place that needs to grow and scale. You will learn the domain from your peers as you identify how to migrate the system for scale and reliability.
• Collaborate - you won’t just be working with people like yourself. You’ll be working with some of the most brilliant geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists and engineers tackling the challenges of geothermal discovery. Collaborating with your peers to solve hard problems is the name of the game.
• Teach - you will bring critical skills and experience that should be taught to others. You will have the opportunity (and education) to help others better understand your craft as a distributed systems engineer, while you learn from them their craft in modeling the earth’s subsurface.

What we’re looking for

• Minimum 7+ years experience in software engineering in a business environment, ideally with a heavy scientific component.
• Experience leading the design and implementation of distributed computing systems.
• Proven technical skills:
  • Experience with the development of fault-tolerant, resilient event-driven architectures, and building and managing orchestration systems to massively scale cloud-based workloads (serverless, Kubernetes, and/or custom VM fleets).
  • Experience defining and developing persistent data storage for digital artifacts, both with RDBMS and cloud blob storage at scale.
  • Experience ensuring system observability through logging, monitoring, alerting and metrics.
  • Familiarity with software engineering best practices: CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar), version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi).
  • Experience architecting, permissioning and maintaining cloud resources (GCP, AWS).
  • Fluency in Python and SQL are required.
  • Experience with any of the following is a plus: experiment tracking, optimization methods, applied algorithm development, reinforcement learning and other AI/ML techniques, web development, and familiarity with geoscience concepts and applications.

Location and Benefits

• The position is based out of our headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is a hybrid position
• Benefits include:
  • Paid holidays
  • 15 days PTO + PTO accrual increase based on tenure
  • Medical, dental and vision coverage
  • 401k
  • Stock options
  • Growth opportunities at a company with a direct impact in displacing carbon emissions

Equal Opportunity Employer

Zanskar is an equal-opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practice laws.