Staff Backend Engineer, Distributed Systems

emerald-ai; San Francisco, Boston, Washington (CA, MA, District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Make an impact

World-class team

Build from 0 to 1

Competitive pay + equity

Comprehensive benefits

Flexible location

Backed by top investors

Job summary

Emerald AI in San Francisco is building the core backend platform powering real-time energy intelligence. We’re hiring a Distributed Systems / Backend Engineer to drive architectural decisions, build foundational infrastructure, and shape our stack as an early engineering hire.

You will work across ingestion, compute, storage, and orchestration, delivering reliable, scalable services and APIs, with opportunities to mentor and influence roadmap, product alignment, and long-term direction.

Qualifications

• Experience with distributed systems or data-intensive applications.
• Experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems with a focus on reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Interest in grid systems, energy orchestration, and applying AI to real-world infrastructure.
• Experience working on real-time or near real-time systems.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous environments and turning open-ended problems into production systems.
• Strong system design skills, including tradeoffs across latency, consistency, and scalability.
• Ability to work across the stack when needed to unblock progress.

Responsibilities

• Designing and scaling systems that interact with real-world energy infrastructure
• Building high-performance services and APIs that power core product workflows
• Tackling hard problems in reliability, data modeling, and system design
• Shipping end-to-end features—from idea to production
• Improving system observability, performance, and fault tolerance
• Partnering closely with product to turn ambiguous problems into shipped solutions

Skills

Distributed systems

Data-intensive apps

Backend development

System design

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Emerald AI in San Francisco is building the core backend platform powering real-time energy intelligence. We’re hiring a Distributed Systems / Backend Engineer to drive architectural decisions, build foundational infrastructure, and shape our stack as an early engineering hire.

You will work across ingestion, compute, storage, and orchestration, delivering reliable, scalable services and APIs, with opportunities to mentor and influence roadmap, product alignment, and long-term direction.