Backend Engineer, Data Systems (Modeling & Simulation)

Code Metal is redefining code translation for mission-critical industries, helping defense partners move more quickly and reliably from algorithm to silicon. In this role, you will help design and build the core data foundations of our platform, focusing on backend engineering, data architecture, and domain modeling.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve relational data models that represent complex domain concepts, entities, relationships, and workflows
• Build and maintain SQL schemas, constraints, indexes, migrations, and query patterns that support scalable backend systems
• Define and enforce data contracts between services, APIs, ingestion pipelines, and downstream consumers
• Develop ingestion and normalization workflows for structured, semi-structured, and external source data
• Move business logic from ad hoc application code into well-modeled, extensible data structures, including configurable rules, eligibility/feasibility checks, mappings and lookup tables, domain-specific constraints, and decision logic represented in data
• Partner with product, domain experts, and engineers to convert ambiguous or evolving requirements into clear data abstractions
• Build backend services and APIs that expose, validate, and operate on these data models
• Improve the consistency, traceability, and maintainability of data across the system
• Help establish patterns for versioned data models, schema governance, data validation, audit-ability, and backward-compatible contracts
• Participate in architecture discussions and code reviews, especially where data modeling decisions have long-term consequences

Requirements:

• Strong professional experience as a backend software engineer working on production systems
• Deep experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL or similar systems
• Strong ability to design normalized schemas, associative/relationship tables, constraints and validation logic, enum/lookup models, and lifecycle-aware data structures
• Strong SQL skills, including complex joins, aggregation, CTEs, views or materialized views where appropriate, and query performance awareness
• Experience defining or working with data contracts between services, APIs, and persistence layers
• Experience building or maintaining data ingestion, transformation, or normalization workflows
• Ability to reason carefully about business rules, edge cases, and how domain logic should be represented in software
• Strong programming ability in Python
• Experience working with ORMs and migration frameworks such as SQLAlchemy, Alembic, or comparable tools
• Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating with engineers, product stakeholders, and domain experts
• Experience designing rule-driven systems, policy engines, feasibility checks, or configuration-driven business logic
• Experience deciding when logic belongs in application code, SQL/database structures, rules tables, or services/domain layers
• Experience modeling complex operational domains such as simulations, logistics, planning systems, geospatial systems, defense, aerospace, or other highly structured data environments
• Experience with PostGIS or geospatial data, event-driven systems, versioned datasets or snapshots, data lineage/provenance, or imported external datasets with inconsistent or incomplete source quality
• Familiarity with API schema design and typed contracts, such as Pydantic, JSON Schema, protobuf, or OpenAPI