Back-end Engineer - Python
Backend Engineer – Python
Location: Denver, Seattle, San Francisco or Washington, DCWorking arrangement: Hybrid
Compensation: $150,000–$180,000 base salary plus equity
Employment type: Full-time
About The Company:
- Join a venture-backed software company building modern infrastructure for satellite operations. The platform enables commercial and government customers to operate different spacecraft and constellations through one scalable software environment.
- The company was founded by experienced engineers and satellite operators who saw an opportunity to replace fragmented, highly customized ground systems with modern, reusable software.
- Approximately 70 employees with a highly technical, engineering-led culture
- Meaningful equity and direct product influence
- Software supporting real commercial and government missions
- Small teams with significant technical ownership
- Opportunity to build foundational systems rather than maintain legacy software
- Collaborative environment with experienced engineers across software, aerospace and operations
The Role:
We are looking for a Backend Engineer to build the foundational services behind a modern satellite-operations platform. This is a hands-on product-engineering role focused primarily on production Python. It is not a DevOps or platform-infrastructure position. You will design and build backend services, APIs and data systems used by customers operating real spacecraft and distributed mission systems. A space background is not required. Strong backend engineers from SaaS, telecom, networking, IoT, robotics, fintech or other complex technical environments are encouraged to apply.
What You’ll Do:
- Design, build and maintain production Python backend services
- Develop scalable APIs and foundational platform capabilities
- Own features from technical design through testing, deployment and production support
- Build reliable services that process and distribute operational data
- Design integrations between internal services and external customer systems
- Work with relational and non-relational databases
- Improve service performance, reliability, observability and security
- Troubleshoot issues across applications, databases and distributed systems
- Collaborate with product, frontend, platform and aerospace engineering teams
- Help shape architecture and engineering standards as the platform scales
- Contribute to a fast-moving product environment with meaningful individual ownership
Required Experience:
- At least three years of professional backend or full-stack software development
- Strong hands-on production Python experienceExperience building APIs, microservices or other backend applications
- Practical AWS experienceExperience working with databases and data models
- Understanding of testing, debugging and production software support
- Ability to clearly explain personal ownership, technical decisions and engineering tradeoffs
- Comfortable working independently within a collaborative startup environment
Nice to Have:
- GraphQL or substantial REST API development
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code toolsCI/CD and automated testing
- Event-driven or asynchronous architectures
- Distributed systems or high-volume data processing
- PostgreSQL, Redis or comparable data technologies
- DevSecOps or security-conscious application development
- Generative AI or LLM integrations
- Experience in telecom, networking, aerospace, robotics, IoT or remote-system operations
What Success Looks Like:
- You can personally own a production service from design through deployment
- You write clean, maintainable and well-tested PythonYou understand how your services operate in production
- You can make thoughtful architectural decisions and explain the tradeoffs
- You are comfortable entering unfamiliar technical areas and learning quickly
- You take responsibility for outcomes rather than working within a narrowly defined task list
EligibilityDue to the nature of the company’s commercial and government work, candidates must satisfy applicable U.S. export-control requirements.