Staff Backend Engineer

Carbon Direct; United States; Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Flexible vacation

Company holidays

Parental leave 16 weeks

Remote-friendly culture

WFH stipend

Annual retreat

Job summary

Carbon Direct is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to design, build, and scale the systems customers rely on to address carbon, climate strategy, and energy challenges. You will own the platform's technical direction, spanning data ingestion, processing, APIs, and developer experience.

You will lead architecture, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, science, and customer teams in a fast-paced ISO 27001/SOC 2 environment, with remote-friendly culture and in-person offices in Seattle or

Qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience at staff level.
• Experience shipping high‑risk changes with rollback, tests, and stakeholder coordination.
• Infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and incident response experience.
• Experience building shared packages and developer tooling.
• Interest in carbon, climate and energy is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy backend services, data pipelines, and APIs.
• Prototype quickly and validate hypotheses, deciding what to rework or discard.
• Harden prototypes for enterprise-scale adoption and narrative security/compliance.
• Take on DevOps/SRE work as the platform demands.
• Mentor engineers and drive backend standards across teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Technical leadership

Systems thinking

CI/CD

AI-augmented systems

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD

Observability

Job description

Join us on 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.

Diverse backgrounds bring diverse perspectives. 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-augmented 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. Bonus points for 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

Benefits

Our U.S. benefits* include:

• Comprehensive nationwide medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• See a preview of our coverage here.
• 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 to U.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.