Software Development Engineer

Encore Talent Solutions; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Encore Talent Solutions is hiring a backend engineer to design and evolve core distributed systems that power an internal AI platform. You will build scalable, reliable services and focus on platform infrastructure rather than model development.

You will work on fault-tolerant processing, data streaming with Kafka/Spark, and cloud deployments (AWS/GCP/Azure) while collaborating with Data/ML and Platform teams to define data contracts and governance.

Qualifications

• Backend engineers with strong CS fundamentals and distributed systems knowledge.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency services in production.
• Familiarity with data pipelines, streaming, and data contracts.

Responsibilities

• Architect fault‑tolerant, high‑performance distributed systems from ground up.
• Build and optimize backend services for data movement and AI workloads.
• Collaborate with Data/ML and Platform teams on data contracts, SLAs, and governance.

Skills

Scala

Go

Rust

Java

Python

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science or related field

Master's preferred or equivalent experience

Tools

Kafka

Spark

PostgreSQL

Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

• Build and evolve core distributed systems that form the foundation of an internal AI Platform
• Enable AI/ML teams by providing scalable, reliable, and high‑performance backend services
• Focus on platform and infrastructure components, not model development
• Operate in a domain where correctness, performance, and fault‑tolerance are critical
• Take ownership of systems that move, process, and serve data at scale for AI workloads
• 3 days on‑site per week in San Jose, CA

Responsibilities

• Architecting solutions: Taking a leading role in technical design discussions to create fault‑tolerant, high‑performance distributed systems from the ground up.
• Experience building distributed systems and the associated design patterns around sending data around.
• Prior work history with using either of the following
• o Scala: Experience with frameworks like Akka / Pekko, Cats Effect
• o Golang: Experience building concurrent services with channels and goroutines.
• Implement fault‑tolerant processing with clear delivery guarantees (at least/exactly‑once), idempotency, backfill/reprocessing, and schema evolution.
• Leveraging cloud infrastructure: Building and optimizing services to run on modern cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and leveraging containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes for deployment
• Design and implement robust event‑driven microservices using Apache Kafka for real‑time data streaming or batching systems to ensure high performance and fault tolerance.
• Collaborate with Data/ML and Platform teams to define data contracts, SLAs, and governance policies including cross‑team architectural designs.

Educational Qualifications

• Bachelors in computer science, Software/Computer Engineering, or related field (master's preferred or equivalent industry experience).
• Strong CS fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, operating systems, networking, and distributed systems.

Industry Experience

• 3–5 years building backend systems at scale, including data pipelines or streaming platforms in production.
• Proven track record delivering high‑throughput, low‑latency services with strong reliability and operability.
• Cross‑functional collaboration with Data/ML, Analytics, and SRE/Platform teams.

Technical Skills

• Languages: Proficiency in any of these backend programming languages: Scala, Go, Rust, Java, Python
• Streaming & Batch: Kafka, Spark;
• SQL: Postgres or equivalent and be proficient in writing CTEs, joins, etc with fluency in analyzing data.
• Reliability & Observability: working with Prometheus/Grafana/Open Telemetry; alerting & dashboards.