Senior Software Engineer - Remote

Valency Systems is a small team of engineers, scientists, and researchers building a global hub for the agentic research era. The Senior Software Engineer will lead backend engineering, distributed systems, infrastructure, data integrations, security, and technical leadership while remaining deeply hands-on.

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
• Has deep backend instincts: clean data models, well-designed APIs, observable services, and resilient failure modes
• Leaves code, documentation, and systems measurably better than you found them
• Brings a product mindset: you understand why you're building something, not just how
• Earns trust through execution, not hierarchy — your opinion carries weight because of what you've shipped
• Thrives in the ambiguity of a fast-moving company and knows when to move fast vs. when to slow down and get it right
• Could step into a management role if needed, but genuinely prefers to stay in the code and go deeper
• 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