Role profile · Engineering

SDE, Backend / Infra

A type of work, not one opening. Join it from your career profile and you’re matched to SDE, Backend / Infra roles as they open. No match is guaranteed, and no company sees you until you say yes.

What strong looks like

Owns a system end to end and can say how it went once live, including any incident they handled. Reasons about data and consistency before frameworks. Has a number for latency, cost, or reliability they moved. Knows what they would not build again.

Core must-haves

• Owned a production system end to end and handled whatever came up once it was live
• Depth in at least one backend language (Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++) with real systems shipped in it
• Designed or materially changed a distributed or high-scale system: consistency, failure modes, capacity
• Cloud and infrastructure fluency: AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, enough to own a deploy
• Debugging and observability: found a root cause in production with logs, metrics, or traces
• Has built with or around LLMs and agents, or can reason about their failure modes

Across every profile: ownership in ambiguity; communication that survives a follow-up; ai-native practice; verifiable outcomes.

Good to have

• Performance, GPU, or inference work
• Customer-facing work: deployed into or debugged a customer's environment
• Open-source contributions or a developer-community footprint
• Founding or founder experience: has balanced craft, ownership, and speed with no scaffolding
• Security fundamentals: threat models, secrets, least privilege
• Frontend competence in TypeScript or React for full-stack stretch

Seniority

Open from recent graduates to 15 or more years. We read level from what you have owned, not from years or brand. What the evidence looks like at each stage:

New grad to 2 years. A real project shipped, ideally in production, with a failure story from it. Depth from an internship, an open-source project, or a startup. Live scenario judged on reasoning, not on having seen it before.

2 to 5 years. Owns a service or component, has been on call, can name a trade-off others lived with.

5 to 10 years. Owns a system with cross-team consequence, has set technical direction on at least one thing, has changed or held a decision on evidence.

10 to 15+ years. Sets the bar for others, chooses what not to build, has a track record across two or more systems or companies. Staff and principal postings ask for this shape, not for years.