Software Engineer, Backend

Normal is an applied AI company solving the hardest problems in AI and silicon. We build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry critical AI infrastructure and the broader systems that power our world in partnership with the worlds most advanced institutions. We work as one team across New York City San Francisco London Copenhagen and Pangyo.

Normal is building software for semiconductor engineers: a local CLI that works inside real chip design environments a web product for managing projects and reviewing results and backend services that coordinate long-running work across both. Making those pieces feel like one dependable product is a backend engineering problem.

This role spans the backend surface behind that product. Depending on the project you might design an API shared by several services evolve a database model without breaking existing sessions make a state transition idempotent improve a local agent loop or remove a deployment or performance bottleneck. The common thread is production software with real state real failure modes and users with complex workflows.

We use AI in the product but this is not an ML role and prior experience with agents is not required. We are looking for backend engineers who enjoy making complex systems clear reliable and easy to operate.

Your scope will depend on your experience interests and the teams priorities. You would likely go deep in a few of these areas rather than own all of them:

• Design stable well-typed interfaces across CLI web and backend services.

• Evolve Postgres schemas migrations event histories and other durable state.

• Build lifecycle queueing retry cancellation idempotency and recovery behavior for long-running work.

• Improve software that runs across developer machines and containerized environments.

• Make failures easier to diagnose through metrics traces structured logs health checks and operator tooling.

• Improve how changes are tested packaged migrated deployed and recovered.

• Find and remove performance bottlenecks in APIs database access event processing and execution paths.

• Deliver product changes that cross repositories languages and service boundaries.

• 4 years of software engineering experience and a track record of shipping backend systems that other people depend on.

• Experience designing APIs and data models and reasoning clearly about concurrency and state.

• Experience operating production services where reliability observability maintainability and performance matter.

• Comfort reasoning about distributed failure modes such as retries partial completion duplicate work cancellation and recovery.

• The ability to debug across boundariesfrom a client or CLI through services databases and deployment infrastructure.

• Pragmatic judgment about when to invest in a durable abstraction and when to ship the straightforward version.

• Range: you have gone deep in at least one area and can become productive in an unfamiliar codebase or technical domain.

• A product mindset: you care whether the system is understandable and dependable for the people using it not only whether the code is correct.

Experience with any of the following is helpful but not required:

• Postgres Redis or Valkey event-driven architectures or high-volume stateful services

• Kubernetes containers cloud infrastructure or deploying software in resource-constrained on-premises customer environments

• Developer tools CLIs workflow engines job schedulers or distributed execution systems

• Semiconductors EDA or hardware engineering workflows

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Normal Computing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability veteran status or any other legally protected status.

Accessibility Accommodations

Normal Computing is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability please let us know at

Privacy Notice

By submitting your application you agree that Normal Computing may collect use and store your personal information for employment-related purposes in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Required Experience:

IC