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Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Owns backend infrastructure including Postgres, job queues, OpenSearch, Redis, and data pipelines at a fast-growing SaaS startup. Scales systems handling millions of events daily, focusing on reliability, tradeoffs, and production excellence. Requires deep scaling expertise in production systems.

190k – 230kSan Francisco, CANew York, NYDevOps / SRERemote

About the role

What You Will Do

  • Own the architecture and scalability of our backend systems, including Postgres, job queues, OpenSearch, Redis, and the data pipelines that move events between customer integrations and our product.
  • Scale our infrastructure from tens of thousands of jobs to orders of magnitude more, ahead of customer demand rather than behind it.
  • Make the tradeoffs that determine whether infra work takes weeks or months. We need someone who knows when to ship the duct-tape fix that buys six months and when to invest in the rewrite that buys five years.
  • Set the bar for reliability, observability, and operational excellence. You decide what "production-ready" means at Centralize.
  • Partner with Will on architecture decisions and with product engineers on the systems they build on top of yours.

What We Are Looking For

  • Demonstrated experience owning and scaling fast-growing production systems that process millions of events per day and hundreds of millions of writes. We need someone who has lived through the hard growth phases, not someone who has read about them.
  • Deep expertise in Postgres at scale, including query optimization, indexing strategy, replication, and the failure modes you only learn the hard way.
  • Strong fluency with job queue infrastructure, AWS, OpenSearch, and Redis. You know where each one shines and where each one breaks.
  • A sharp instinct for tradeoffs. Infra projects can take months. The best infra engineers know how to ship the 80% solution that captures most of the value in a fraction of the time, and how to recognize when the 100% solution is actually worth it.
  • Excitement about the scaling problem in front of us. You should want to take a small startup's infrastructure and turn it into something that handles massive scale, and you should want to do it as the person making the calls, not as one engineer on a team of fifty.
  • Excellent written and verbal English communication. You can document an architecture decision in a doc another engineer can read in five minutes.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience scaling B2B SaaS infrastructure through Series A to Series C+ stages.
  • Prior experience as the first or second infra hire at a fast-growing startup.
  • Background in integrations-heavy systems (Salesforce, Gmail, calendar, CRM data) where data quality and rate limits are first-class problems.
  • Experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale.

Compensation

  • $190,000 to $230,000 base salary depending on level, plus 0.40% to 0.70% equity. Final offer calibrated to seniority and experience.
  • Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance
  • 401(k)
  • Parental leave
  • Unlimited PTO plus company holidays
  • Quarterly offsite
  • Equipment stipend

Skills

PostgresAWSOpensearchRedisJob QueuesData PipelinesQuery OptimizationIndexingReplicationObservability

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