# Software Engineer - Backend

**Company:** [Nominal](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/nominal)
**Location:** New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA, Austin, TX
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $130k – $230k/yr
**Experience:** 3+ years
**Skills:** Go, Rust, Java, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Azure, ClickHouse, Timescaledb, Druid, Influxdb, Parquet, Kafka
**Posted:** 2026-03-05

> Builds and owns distributed backend systems for ingesting, processing, and storing high-frequency telemetry data for hardware platforms. Requires 3+ years in performance-critical systems, expertise in Go/Rust/Java, cloud infra, and storage/streaming tech.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Architect and evolve distributed systems that ingest, process, and persist high-frequency telemetry and sensor data.
- Design storage and indexing strategies for large, time-series, and event-driven datasets with strict performance and correctness requirements.
- Tackle hard problems around scalability, backpressure, fault tolerance, and data consistency in real-time systems.
- Optimize hot paths, reduce tail latency, and improve reliability as the system scales with new customers and use cases.
- Collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and customer-facing engineers to solve domain-specific problems for cutting-edge hardware teams.
- Influence backend architecture and technical direction, mentoring teammates, and raising the bar for system design across the org.

## Requirements
- 3+ years building distributed systems where performance, reliability, and operational simplicity matter.
- Strong experience in **Go**, **Rust**, or **Java**, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long-lived systems.
- Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (**AWS**, **GCP**, or **Azure**) and production tooling like **Kubernetes**, **Docker**, and **Terraform**.
- Hands-on experience designing or operating storage systems — time-series databases, columnar formats, or analytics engines (e.g., **ClickHouse**, **TimescaleDB**, **Druid**, **InfluxDB**, **Parquet**).
- Experience with streaming or data processing technologies such as **Kafka**, **Apache Arrow**, **Flink**, or **Spark**.
- Comfort reasoning about distributed systems tradeoffs — latency vs throughput, consistency vs availability, abstraction vs control.
- Clear technical communication and a bias toward ownership: you design it, build it, ship it, and operate it.

## Compensation
Base pay range: **$130,000 – $230,000** per year.

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