Staff Backend Engineer

Carbon Direct; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 166,000 - 202,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible vacation policy

16 weeks parental leave

Remote-friendly culture

Home office stipend

Job summary

Carbon Direct is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to help build and scale the systems our customers rely on to meet their carbon, climate strategy, and energy challenges.

You’ll own the platform end-to-end, guiding architecture across services, pipelines, and APIs, and mentor engineers while operating in an ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant environment where access control, data protection, and auditability are treated from the first commit.

Qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience with staff-level ownership.
• Ability to ship high-risk changes with rollback plans and test coordination.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy robust backend services, data pipelines, and highly available APIs, owning the full path data takes through the platform.
• Prototype quickly to test hypotheses and decide what to rework or discard.
• Harden validated prototypes for enterprise-scale adoption.
• Make architectural decisions with limited precedent and resolve weak points before customer impact.
• Flex into devops and SRE work as the platform demands.
• Support the developer experience for AI-empowered contributors, building modules and guardrails for safe backend capabilities.
• Set technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive cross-team initiatives.

Skills

Backend engineering

Staff level

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Observability

AI-augmented systems

Job description

Join uson the journey to get to net zero

At Carbon Direct, we dedicate our scientific, software, and business expertise to empower organizations around the world to take climate action.

Our Mission

Enable organizations to reduce, remove, and utilize their emissions with carbon science

We are a purpose-driven carbon management firm dedicated to helping organizations around the world reach their climate goals. We make carbon science accessible and actionable with our end-to-end platform.

Global citizens with global impact

Whether a scientist, developer, or carbon markets expert, we are united by our mission to take climate action now. We are experts in our fields and we act with confidence. Located across 4 countries and 10+ states in the U.S., we offer both remote-friendly work options and dynamic, in-person experiences with offices located in Seattle, WA and Oakland, CA.

We recognize that teams with diverse backgrounds and different experiences are powerful. Bringing together a variety of perspectives only enhances how we can effectively address the climate crisis. Together, we are creating an environment where everyone is celebrated and anyone can succeed.

Overview

Carbon Direct is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to help build and scale the systems our customers rely on to overcome their carbon, climate strategy, and energy challenges.

This is a role for someone who brings deep technical ownership to the platform and thinks in systems: who can trace a piece of data from the pipeline that ingests it, through the services and contracts that transform and move it, out through the APIs that expose it, and all the way to how a customer ultimately consumes and relies on it.

You’ll set technical direction and make sure the platform holds together as it scales, flexing across feature development, architecture, operations, and the developer experience that lets contributors outside engineering ship. You will operate at pace in an ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant environment where access control, data protection, and auditability are considered from the first commit.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and deploy robust backend services, data pipelines, and highly available APIs, owning the full path data takes through the platform.
• Prototype quickly to test hypotheses, deciding what to rework and what to discard.
• Harden validated prototypes, taking them through enterprise-scale adoption.
• Make sound architectural decisions with limited precedent, resolving weak points before they become customer-facing problems.
• Flex into devops and SRE work as the platform demands.
• Support the developer experience for AI-empowered contributors from non-engineering backgrounds, building the modules and guardrails that let them ship and maintain backend capability safely.
• Set technical direction and standards for backend engineering, mentor other engineers, and drive initiatives that span multiple services, pipelines, and teams.

What we’re looking for

• Extensive professional experience as a backend engineer, with a track record of operating at staff level and setting technical direction with minimal oversight.
• Vertical ownership. You have carried work from database schema through API and integration tests to the monitors that watch it in production.
• You ship high-risk changes with a rollback path, a test plan, and proactively coordinate with stakeholders to reduce and mitigate disruptions.
• Infrastructure fluency and reliability chops: infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and incident response experience.
• An innovator who uses agentic engineering tools in their daily workflow and has deployed AI-augmented software systems to production.
• A track record of building shared packages, tooling, and documentation that made the engineers and non-engineers around you faster.
• A team player who collaborates effectively with product managers, scientists, and customer-facing teams, translating their needs into technical solutions.
• Genuine interest in carbon, climate strategy, and energy is a strong plus.
• Experience building or operating in a regulated environment (ISO 27001, SOC 2, or similar).
• Depth in production AI-augmented systems: durable execution for long-running agents, evals with quantified reliability thresholds, identity and scoped permissions carried through agent tool calls, and defense against prompt injection on untrusted context.

Why Carbon Direct

You’ll join a mission-driven company where you can apply your skills to one of the most consequential problems of our time, with the agency and autonomy to build systems that don’t yet exist and the responsibility to see them through to production.

Salary Range

$184,000-$225,000 a year

While we love our work, our lives aren’t defined by it. At Carbon Direct, we offer a robust benefits package that considers the whole person, their partners, and their families – and we’re always looking to improve.

• Time off as needed: Flexible vacation policy and ten company-wide holidays, plus annual winter break between Christmas and New Year's
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental and family leave with no tenure requirement
• Remote-friendly work culture with annual company-wide retreats
• Reimbursement for your work-from-home setup and monthly work-from-home stipend

*Please note that the benefits described apply toU.S.-based employees only. For our international employees, our benefits package varies by each country and its statutory requirements.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Carbon Direct is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, disability, marital status, veteran status, or any other occupationally irrelevant criteria. We adhere rigorously to our equal employment opportunity policies in connection with all employment decisions, including hiring, compensation and promotion.