Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Beacon Biosignals; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon Biosignals seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Datastore team. You will design and scale backend data infrastructure, including PostgreSQL data models, Kafka pipelines, and the GraphQL API that powers scientific workflows. This role emphasizes architecture over individual components and collaboration across teams.

This position is 100% remote from anywhere in the U.S. with in-person hubs in Boston, NYC, and Paris.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience.
• Proficiency in data modeling, distributed systems, API design, or database engineering.
• Strong SQL skills with PostgreSQL experience.
• Hands-on data streaming/event processing with Kafka or equivalents.
• Proficiency in Julia or Python; Julia encouraged but not required.
• Experience with GraphQL and TypeScript/JavaScript (Node.js).
• Experience deploying services in Kubernetes and IaC tools (Terraform/Helm).
• Mentoring engineers and improving team practices and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and architecture for complex Datastore projects and data pipelines.
• Collaborate with product managers, scientists, and other teams to translate requirements into scalable solutions.
• Debug and profile cross-system issues and improve code quality, tests, and tooling.
• Ensure data integrity, sound design, and maintainability across systems over time.
• Draft RFCs and guide teams through complex feature discovery and design phases.
• Plan work and balance speed, generalizability, and technical debt across stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to engineering practices and documentation.
• Improve operational robustness and ease of use via docs, tools, and dashboards.

Skills

Backend development

Data modeling

SQL (PostgreSQL)

Distributed systems

API design

Kafka

GraphQL

TypeScript/JavaScript

Kubernetes

Python/Julia

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Pulsar

Kubernetes

Terraform/Helm

GraphQL

Job description

Beacon Biosignals is transforming precision medicine for the brain, from clinical development to clinical care. For Life Sciences partners, we offer the leading at-home EEG platform for clinical development of novel therapeutics for neurological, psychiatric, and sleep disorders. Our Diagnostics business is building the most comprehensive at-home platform for precision diagnostics, combining EEG and cardiopulmonary signals to deliver reimbursable assessments for sleep and central nervous system disorders. Together, we're changing the way patients are diagnosed and treated for any disorder that affects brain physiology.

Beacon Biosignals is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Datastore team. The Datastore sits at the heart of Beacon's platform. It defines our foundational data model and serves as the centralized repository and API for brain data collected from clinical studies, supporting the analytical tools, services, and applications used by our scientists, clinicians, and partners.

This role emphasizes the design and scaling of backend systems for data infrastructure: PostgreSQL data models, Kafka-driven event pipelines, and the GraphQL API that makes scientific and clinical data usable - distinct from frontend development or end-user product surfaces. At this level you will lead the design of complex systems within the Datastore rather than individual components, own the pipelines that deliver dataset snapshots into our warehouse, and collaborate across platform, application and scientific teams to implement APIs that unlock new workflows in Beacon's expanding portfolio of clinical studies and digital health products.

You should expect to write SQL by hand, and to reason about schema design, indexes, and query behavior as a matter of course.

This role is 100% remote from anywhere in the U.S. Beacon's robust asynchronous work practices ensure a first-class remote work experience, but we also have in-person office hubs in Boston, New York City, and Paris.

What success looks like

• You lead design and architecture for complex projects and systems within the Datastore, weighing implementation trade-offs with engineering principles and backing your decisions with data rather than preference
• You partner with product managers, scientific and clinical stakeholders, and other development and support teams to translate their requirements into new integrations, services, and solutions for scaling Beacon's data platform - contributing to broader product and technical decisions, not simply implementing them
• You debug and profile ambiguous problems that cross system boundaries, including codebases beyond the Datastore's purview, and you leave what you touch better than you found it --- structure, test coverage, tooling
• Peers look to your work as an example: you implement features with attention to detail, demonstrating product awareness and high standards for data integrity, design soundness, and maintainability across the lifespan of the system
• You draft RFCs to lead complex feature discovery and technical design phases, soliciting and incorporating input, and helping your team align on a set of decisions to guide development
• You plan your own work and contribute to planning the team's, making reasoned trade-offs between speed, generalizability, and technical debt, and accounting for the needs of multiple stakeholder teams
• You teach and mentor other engineers regularly, give feedback that people act on, and are sought out for it. You may act as tech lead on a project or as the coordination point for engineering practice within the team
• You leverage feedback from internal stakeholders and external partners to improve operational robustness and ease of use of the Datastore and its services via new documentation, tools, and dashboards

What you will bring

• 7+ years of backend development experience, including at least 3 years focused on data platforms and backend infrastructure for data-centric applications: transactional systems, event pipelines, and the APIs that serve them
• Highly proficient in at least one technical area relevant to this work: data modeling, distributed systems, API design, or database engineering, with the depth that others on a team come to you for
• Strong proficiency in SQL, with production experience working with PostgreSQL as an application database; you write and tune queries fluently and are comfortable reasoning about schema design, indexes, and query plans
• Hands-on experience with data streaming and event processing, using Kafka (our event bus) or an equivalent such as RabbitMQ, Pulsar, or a cloud-based equivalent like Amazon Kinesis
• Proficiency in Julia or Python; Julia is a core Datastore language, and experience with Julia is a strong plus, but not required --- we welcome candidates eager to learn it!
• Experience with GraphQL and TypeScript/JavaScript (Node.js) - GraphQL is the Datastore's primary interface
• Experience deploying and operating services in containerized environments, with familiarity in Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and/or Helm
• A track record of mentoring engineers and improving how a team works - practices, tooling, test coverage, or documentation that outlasted your involvement
• A collaborative mindset: you enjoy working across disciplines and believe people achieve more together than alone
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in asynchronous and remote-friendly environments
• A self-directed approach, with a track record of thriving in hybrid or fully remote teams
• Experience with, or interest in, using LLM-assisted or agentic coding tools in a production setting, with good judgment about what guardrails are needed

We don't expect every candidate to check every box. If you bring strong fundamentals, care about data infrastructure for health, and are excited to learn, we'd love to hear from you!

The US-based salary range for this role is $170,000 -- $190,000. Salary ranges are determined using current market compensation data for this role and adjusted based on experience, skills, and location. The base salary is one component of the total compensation package, which includes equity, PTO and other benefits.

At Beacon, we've found that cultural and scientific impact is driven most by those that lead by example. As such, we're always seeking new contributors whose work demonstrates an avid curiosity, a bias towards simplicity, an eye for composability, a self-service mindset, and - most of all - a deep empathy towards colleagues, stakeholders, users, and patients. We believe a diverse team builds more robust systems and achieves higher impact.