Software Engineer - Backend/Distributed Systems
External
Emerald-ai · Bay AreaPrepare for this interview
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About the role
We're hiring a Distributed Systems / Backend Engineer to serve as a key contributor on the core backend platform powering Emerald AI. This is a high-impact role: you will drive architectural decisions, introduce best practices, build foundational infrastructure, and help guide the evolution of our real-time energy intelligence engine. You'll work across ingestion, compute, storage, and system orchestration-designing components that must be highly reliable, resilient, and capable of operating at scale. As one of the early engineering hires, you'll have a major influence on our stack, roadmap, and long-term technical direction. We hire across levels, from early-career to staff+, with expectations and scope aligned to your ability to drive outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Designing and scaling systems that interact with real-world energy infrastructure
- Building high-performance services and APIs that power core product workflows
- Tackling hard problems in reliability, data modeling, and system design
- Shipping end-to-end features-from idea to production
- Improving system observability, performance, and fault tolerance
- Partnering closely with product to turn ambiguous problems into shipped solutions
- For senior candidates, you'll have immediate opportunities to:
- Drive architecture and technical direction
- Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives
- Mentor and elevate other engineers
- Who Thrives Here
- Engineers who want to build, not just maintain
- People who take ownership without waiting for permission
- Those who enjoy figuring things out when the path isn't obvious
- Engineers who care about both technical excellence and real-world impact
- People who prefer high trust, high accountability environments
- Preferred requirements
- Experience with distributed systems or data-intensive applications
- Experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems with a focus on reliability, performance, and scalability
- Interest in grid systems, energy orchestration, and applying AI to real-world infrastructure
- Experience working on real-time or near real-time systems
- Comfort operating in ambiguous environments and turning open-ended problems into production systems
- Strong system design skills, including tradeoffs across latency, consistency, and scalability
- Ability to work across the stack when needed to unblock progress
Benefits
Additional Information
About Emerald AI We're at a pivotal moment for AI and energy. Demand for compute is skyrocketing, but power constraints are becoming a critical bottleneck. Emerald AI sits at the intersection of these two worlds, enabling AI data centers to scale without overwhelming the grid. Our Emerald Conductor software platform makes data centers flexible and responsive, allowing them to adjust power usage dynamically. This unlocks massive AI growth without major new infrastructure, while also strengthening the grid and supporting the expansion of renewable energy. We're a team of experts across AI, cloud, software, and energy-on a mission to scale AI sustainably. We're backed by leading investors and partners including Radical Ventures and NVIDIA. Learn more about our vision, team, and backers at https://www.emeraldai.co/ .
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