Staff Backend Engineer Platform & Intelligence

Scale Systems. Ship at Velocity. Own the Core.

Location: San Francisco CA (Hybrid)

The Mission

Search Atlas hit $32M ARR bootstrapped. No VC. No safety net. Just systems that handle millions of crawls daily terabytes of search data and AI agents making autonomous decisions in milliseconds.

Our backend is the nervous system of agentic marketing. When our AI decides to optimize a Fortune 500s technical SEO your code executes that decision. When we process 10x more pages next year your architecture makes it possible.

We need a Staff Backend Engineer who codes like a senior IC and thinks like a founder. Youll own critical systems mentor the team through shipping and make architectural calls that define our trajectory.

This is high-ownership backend engineering at scale. San -person energy. Ship-or-die velocity.

What Winning Looks Like

Month 1: Youve shipped performance optimizations that cut API latency by 30%. You know our PostgreSQL schemas Celery task flows and Kubernetes clusters better than the docs.

Month 3: Youve led a major architectural decision maybe its a new service extraction a data pipeline refactor or a critical path optimization. The team adopts your pattern.

Month 6: Youre the go-to technical authority for your domain. Engineers seek your code reviews. Product trusts your estimates. Your systems handle 10x load without breaking a sweat.

Your Arena

Youll own backend systems for one of our core product verticals:

Crawl Intelligence - Distributed systems processing millions of pages daily. Fault-tolerant queues intelligent rate limiting data pipeline resilience.

AI Agent Infrastructure - The backend powering autonomous SEO agents. LLM orchestration tool use APIs reasoning state management sub-100ms response requirements.

Search Data Platform - PostgreSQL ClickHouse Elasticsearch at scale. Query optimization indexing strategies real-time analytics pipelines.

The Work

Ship Performant Systems

• Build and own Django REST applications that handle high-throughput data-intensive workloads. Your APIs are fast documented and battle tested.

• Design Celery task architectures that process millions of background jobs without dropping data. You understand idempotency retry strategies and dead letter queues.

• Optimize PostgreSQL at scale. Query tuning index strategy connection pooling partitioning - you dont just write ORM calls you own database performance.

Architect for 10x

• Make architectural decisions that scale from millions to billions of operations. Microservices extraction data pipeline redesign caching strategies async patterns.

• Contribute to platform-wide standards that make the entire engineering team faster and more reliable.

• Review code with depth - you catch race conditions N1 queries and architectural anti-patterns before they hit production.

Lead by Shipping

• Mentor engineers through code reviews pair programming and technical guidance. You elevate the teams output by elevating their craft.

• Partner with Product Frontend and DevOps to deliver end-to-end features. You dont throw specs over walls; you co-own outcomes.

• Drive engineering excellence: TDD linting (Black Flake8 isort) test coverage enforcement CI/CD optimization.

Own Observability

• Build systems you can debug at 3am. Sentry Datadog Grafana - you instrument everything create actionable alerts and fix root causes not symptoms.

• Identify performance bottlenecks across the stack. Profile measure optimize. Latency is a feature you own.

You

Youve built backend systems that handle serious scale - and you can prove it.

• 7 years shipping Python in production environments. Django REST Framework is second nature.

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise - query optimization indexing strategies replication partitioning. You understand execution plans and lock contention.

• Celery at scale - task queue architecture worker optimization monitoring and failure handling in high-volume environments.

• API craft - REST design OpenAPI/DRF Spectacular versioning strategies backward compatibility.

• DevOps fluency - Docker Kubernetes CI/CD pipelines. You dont need to be SRE but you can debug a pod optimize a build and read Terraform.

• Observability mindset - Sentry Datadog Grafana. You build systems that tell you when theyre breaking before users do.

• Leadership through code - mentoring experience code review culture technical decision-making that the team trusts.

Bonus: Experience with ClickHouse or analytical databases. Search infrastructure (crawling indexing ranking). AI/ML backend systems (LLM APIs vector databases). MarTech or SEO domain knowledge.

The Stack

Core: Python 3 Django REST Framework Celery PostgreSQL
Data: ClickHouse (analytics) Elasticsearch (search) Redis (caching)
Infrastructure: Kubernetes Docker microservices architecture
Observability: Sentry Datadog Grafana - we measure everything
Scale: Millions of pages daily terabytes of search data sub-100ms latency requirements

The Deal

Compensation

• Base: $200K$280K

• Benefits: Fully covered medical (Aetna) 99% dental/vision unlimited PTO paid parental leave $100/quarter dev budget company-paid Lasik (2-year vest) pet insurance (Lemonade 2 pets) 401(k) via Deel

The Opportunity

• Hybrid in San Francisco. Deep collaboration rapid iteration technical sparring - this happens best in person.

• We ship weekly. We optimize daily. We measure everything.

• No staff engineers who dont code. No architecture without implementation. No mentorship without shipping alongside.

The Company

Search Atlas powers autonomous marketing for Fortune 500s and high-growth startups:

• OTTO SEO - Fully autonomous technical optimization

• Content Genius - Semantic AI content generation

• Site Explorer - Real-time search intelligence

• BrandVault - AI-driven knowledge graphs

• GBP Galactic - Local SEO automation

• Smart Ads - Autonomous PPC management

Inc. 5000. Nevadas #1 Small Business Workplace. Great Place to Work Certified.

Bootstrapped. Profitable. Growing fast. Building the future from San Francisco.

No cover letters. No generic applications. Just evidence of craft.

$32M ARR. Bootstrapped. Category-defining. San Francisco.

Search Atlas is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members.

Must be currently authorized to work in the US without future sponsorship.