Staff Backend Software Engineer: Streaming

Archetype AI is developing an innovative AI platform aimed at integrating AI into real-world applications. The role involves designing and developing high-performance, scalable data streaming services, collaborating with cross-functional teams to implement cutting-edge AI capabilities in production environments.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, implement, and maintain real-time data streaming systems that support high-throughput, low-latency data services (e.g. sensor data edge-to-cloud streaming)
• Continuously optimize real-time streaming performance from client-to-cloud for a wide range of real-time sensor data types (e.g. video, time series, sensor logs, lidar, radar, audio)
• Build tooling and observability to monitor system health, identify bottlenecks, and proactively resolve instability
• Introduce new techniques, architectures, and best practices to push the limits of scalability, efficiency, and reliability
• Own problems end-to-end—from design to deployment—with a strong bias toward quality, automation, and continuous improvement
• Balance rapid iteration on early-stage systems with long-term maintainability and architectural soundness
• Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence, mentorship, and team-first collaboration

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on real-time data streaming (e.g. video, audio, message streams)
• Deep understanding of data streaming protocols, including modern networking protocols (e.g. QUIC)
• Experience designing and optimizing custom streaming technologies for real-time data transfer
• Ability to design APIs for real-time and near-real-time data streaming use cases
• Experience building and operating production-grade systems at scale in cloud environments (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP)
• Strong debugging, instrumentation, and observability skills across distributed systems
• Demonstrated ownership of complex technical problems and ability to learn and adapt quickly
• Proven track record of scaling systems through rapid growth and rebuilding or refactoring for new demands
• Experience building systems that degrade gracefully under load: back pressure, rate limiting, circuit breaking, bulk heading, and queuing
• Strong understanding of failure modes in distributed systems and mitigation techniques
• Proven experience owning high-availability services (e.g., SLOs, incident response, on-call), including capacity planning and load testing
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages (e.g., Rust, C++, Python)
• Experience designing internal tools or platforms to support developer productivity and experimentation
• Strong product intuition, and ability to collaborate closely with cross-functional teams including research and design