Applied Methods
~JobsJudgment LabsSenior Backend Engineer

Judgment Labs

Senior Backend Engineer

EngineeringSan FranciscoOn-SiteFull-TimePosted today

About the role

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own the services and APIs that power the data layer. You'll design the systems that ingest, evaluate, and serve agent telemetry at scale.

What You'll Do

  • Design and build high-throughput backend services that ingest and process hundreds of thousands of agent traces per second.

  • Own the API surface our SDKs and dashboards depend on: define contracts, manage versioning, and keep latency low under real customer load.

  • Tune our OLAP layer (ClickHouse) through schema design, query optimization, and access-pattern analysis so reads stay fast as data grows to petabyte scale.

  • Partner with the platform and infra teams on scalability, reliability, and the systems that back our evaluation and monitoring pipelines.

  • Advocate for a high bar on backend and engineering quality: reliable, efficient, well-documented, testable, and maintainable.

What We're Looking For

  • 6+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems and services.

  • Strong fundamentals in API design, data modeling, and the trade-offs of distributed systems under real production load.

  • Hands-on experience with OLAP / columnar databases (ClickHouse, Presto) and a feel for how query patterns map to storage internals.

  • Experience designing high-performance distributed systems.

  • Comfort across the stack, with the breadth to reason about platform and infra decisions.

  • Strong communication skills. You write clearly, review well, and make the people around you better.

Nice to Have

  • Experience scaling pipelines that fan out to LLM APIs and managing the rate-limit, retry, and cost dynamics that come with them.

  • Familiarity with streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Ray) and ML orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).

  • Background in embedding / vector search infrastructure or data quality monitoring.

  • Prior work on observability or developer-facing platform products.