Staff Backend Engineer

FPSG; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

FPSG is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for Circuit's backend, building Go and Python services with a focus on resilience, scalability, and performance under increasing load.

You will own the data platform layer, design and implement database sharding, evaluate self-hosted Postgres migration, and build custom index strategies for embedding-heavy workloads. You will mentor other engineers and collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to ship reliable backend systems from ambiguous problems.
• Deep Go expertise, performance tuning, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on production Postgres management, tuning, and self-hosted deployments.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Observability with Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and tracing.
• Ability to collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, implement, and scale backend infrastructure in Go.
• Own data platform layer; design sharding, partitioning, and migrate toward self-hosted Postgres.
• Design safe data migration strategies for production at scale.
• Ensure backend systems are resilient, observable, and performant under load.
• Drive architectural decisions for long-term scalability and maintainability.
• Contribute code to core backend systems; improve efficiency and velocity.
• Collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver features.
• Mentor and support engineers, fostering growth and knowledge sharing.

Skills

Go

Python

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Docker

Kubernetes

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Mentoring

Job description

Incredible opportunity with a well-funded AI start-up that's solving a genuinely difficult problem in manufacturing.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll play a critical role in shaping and scaling Circuit's backend systems and infrastructure. You'll own complex backend services built primarily in Go and Python, with a focus on resilience, scalability, and performance under increasing load.

Role Responsibilities

• Leading designing, implementing and scaling of backend infrastructure and services, primarily in Go
• Owning the data platform layer, designing and executing database sharding and partitioning strategies, evaluate and potentially migrate toward self-hosted Postgres, and build custom index strategies for embedding-heavy workloads
• Designing and driving data migration strategies that are safe to run against production systems at scale
• Ensuring backend systems are resilient, observable, and performant under high customer load
• Driving architectural decisions for long-term scalability and maintainability
• Contributing significant code to core backend systems, focusing on efficiency, robustness, and developer velocity
• Collaborating closely with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver high-quality features
• Mentoring and supporting other engineers, fostering growth and knowledge sharing

Person Specification

• Proven track record turning ambiguous problem statements into shipped, reliable backend systems
• Significant expertise in Go, with deep knowledge of performance optimization, concurrency, and distributed systems
• Deep, hands-on experience managing Postgres in production at scale, including tuning, replication, vacuuming, and operational ownership beyond managed cloud services
• Experience running and operating self-hosted Postgres (not just RDS or equivalent), including storage optimization and infrastructure-level configuration
• Proven experience designing and executing data migrations and database scaling strategies (sharding, partitioning, tiered storage) in live production environments.
• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience designing observable and operable systems, using metrics, logs, traces, testing, and alerts to detect and diagnose issues early (Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
• Hands-on experience stepping outside core backend ownership into one or more of infrastructure (cloud, IaC), ML systems (Python), or frontend (React) to solve integration problems, unblock teams, and directly implement

If you are an experienced backend engineer with proven Go expertise, excited about scaling infrastructure under real-world load, and motivated to shape the future of agentic systems at a fast-moving start-up, we'd love to hear from you!

FPSG is committed to equal opportunities regardless of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief and age.