Senior Software Engineer - Remote

Valency Systems is a team of engineers, scientists, and researchers building a global hub for the agentic research era. The Senior Software Engineer will design and own backend services, distributed systems, infrastructure, data integrations, security, and reliability initiatives while providing technical leadership and mentorship.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and own critical backend services — APIs, data pipelines, async workers, and the infrastructure that keeps them running reliably at scale
• Make sound architectural decisions and document trade-offs clearly so the whole team can learn from them
• Drive platform and reliability investments alongside feature work — the foundational improvements that keep pace with growth
• Establish and uphold high standards for code quality, test coverage, and operational excellence
• Diagnose and resolve complex performance, reliability, and scalability issues; conduct thorough post-mortems that prevent recurrence
• Design and maintain distributed systems that are resilient to failure — applying patterns like circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, and rate limiting where they count
• Own the full lifecycle of services from design through deployment, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure
• Implement and iterate on observability practices: structured logging, metrics dashboards, distributed tracing, and alerting
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and cloud cost optimization
• Design performant, well-normalized data models across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and non-relational (Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB) stores
• Build and maintain data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, and integrations with third-party services and external APIs
• Apply caching strategies thoughtfully — CDN, in-memory, and application-level — and understand the failure modes of each
• Work with message queues and event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ) to build decoupled, async architectures
• Apply secure coding practices by default: input validation, secrets management, least-privilege access, and protection against common vulnerabilities
• Contribute to compliance efforts (SOC 2, GDPR, or similar) with an understanding of how engineering decisions affect data privacy and auditability
• Be the go-to engineer for hard problems — unblock teammates, provide crisp technical direction, and raise the quality of design reviews
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, pairing, and direct, constructive feedback
• Write architecture decision records (ADRs) and technical documentation that outlast the original project
• Partner with Product and Design to scope work realistically, surface constraints early, and deliver with clarity
• Represent engineering in cross-functional conversations and earn influence through execution, not hierarchy

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in backend systems — APIs, databases, distributed architectures, and cloud infrastructure
• Strong command of at least one backend language (Python, Go, Java, Rust, or similar) and comfort working across major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (schema design, query optimization, indexing) and familiarity with non-relational or caching layers
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines
• Demonstrated ability to own and deliver complex, ambiguous projects end-to-end with minimal supervision
• Track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without formal authority
• Clear, direct communication — you can explain a hard trade-off to an engineer and a product manager alike
• Experience working in a startup environment — you've built and scaled systems while the business was growing rapidly underneath them, worn multiple hats, and thrived in ambiguity
• Experience with our stack or adjacent: Node.js/TypeScript, AWS Lambda/CDK/Step Functions, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare
• Familiarity with auth systems (e.g. OAuth) and observability tooling
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Temporal, Airflow, Prefect) and async job processing at scale
• Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) and cloud cost management