Staff Backend Engineer

FPSG; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

FPSG is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to help shape and scale Circuit's backend systems. You will own core services built in Go and Python, focusing on resilience, scalability, and high performance under increasing load.

You will lead infrastructure design, data migrations, and database strategies, while enabling efficient collaboration with product, ML, and frontend teams. FPSG supports growth, learning, and strong engineering ownership.

Qualifications

• Proven backend design and implementation experience.
• Strong expertise in Go and Postgres in production environments.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, performance, and scalability.

Responsibilities

• Lead designing and scaling backend services primarily in Go.
• Own data platform strategies including sharding and partitioning of Postgres.
• Design safe data migrations and ensure production safety during upgrades.
• Maintain resilient, observable backend systems under high load.
• Collaborate with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver features.
• Mentor engineers and promote knowledge sharing.

Skills

Go

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Observability

Containerization

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Docker

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Terraform

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

Responsibilities will include:

• 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

Essential skills will include:

• 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.