Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

Azolla Ventures; Salt Lake City, Northern (UT, KY); Hybrid; 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

Job summary

Zanskar is seeking a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to build a next‑generation multi‑physics well‑targeting engine for geothermal research. The role is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with hybrid work, and you will help design and maintain distributed compute systems used by scientists.

Ideal candidates have 7+ years of software engineering experience, fluency in Python and SQL, and strong cloud/CI‑CD experience (GCP/AWS).

Qualifications

• Experience leading the design and implementation of distributed computing systems.
• Fluency in Python and SQL; strong knowledge of cloud environments (GCP/AWS).
• Familiarity with CI/CD, containerization and IaC tooling.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of a reliable distributed compute system.
• Grow and scale the current multi-physics well-targeting engine.
• Collaborate with geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists and engineers.
• Teach and share craft in distributed systems while learning others' domains.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

SQL

Cloud platforms

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

GitHub Actions

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.