Senior/Staff Software Engineer – Backend

Engg; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

General Intuition is building the Medal backend to power real-time communications and billions of user clips. We seek a senior backend engineer to architect scalable, low-latency systems, design APIs, and mentor teams.

You will work with product, infra, and data teams to drive technical decisions, reliability, and security while leveraging Java, microservices, and modern cloud infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in Java and 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.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement scalable, low-latency backend services.
• Design and evolve critical APIs and data access layers.
• Mentor engineers and drive cross-team technical decisions.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and data teams to ensure reliable deployments.
• Ensure security, reliability, and scalability across services.

Skills

Java

Microservices

RESTful APIs

Distributed systems

MySQL PostgreSQL

Cloud platforms

CI/CD IaC

System design security

Leadership cross-team

Performance tuning

Tools

Redis

RabbitMQ

Kubernetes

Terraform

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've raised over $650M from Khosla, GC, Valor, and Point72 since October 2025, and recently closed our latest round at a $6.2B valuation.

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