Senior Backend Engineer

SENIOR BACKEND ENGINEERAustin, TX | Full-time | Fully In-Office\-------------------------------------------------------------COMPENSATIONBase: $175K--$250KEquity: 0.2--0.75%\-------------------------------------------------------------WHY THIS ROLEThis is the most consequential engineering hire at a well-funded digital health startup this year — you'll own the full backend stack, report directly to the CTO, and have a defined path to building and leading the engineering team as the company scales toward Series A and beyond. The founding team carries direct pedigree from high-growth consumer health wearables and large-scale data infrastructure at notable tech companies. Compensation tops out at $250K base with meaningful equity (0.2–0.75%), which is strong for a pre-Series A stage. If you want to go from senior engineer to engineering leader without waiting in line, this is the inflection point.\-------------------------------------------------------------ABOUT THE ROLEYou'll own and evolve the full backend architecture — Go services, gRPC/REST APIs, async pipelines, and AWS infrastructure — for a novel health monitoring product. The core technical challenge: scaling a data ingest and ML processing pipeline from 50 GB/day today toward 2 TB/day as the user base grows, while keeping infrastructure costs efficient (~$6/user/month target). This role reports directly to the CTO. As the company grows post-Series A, you'll also help hire and lead the backend engineering team.\-------------------------------------------------------------REQUIREMENTSExperience: 5+ years in backend / distributed systems engineering\- Ownership of end-to-end backend architecture: Go services, gRPC/REST APIs, async processing pipelines\- Production experience with AWS (ECS/Fargate, S3, SQS) and Terraform\- Ability to design and scale high-throughput data ingest or ML processing pipelines\- Strong independent decision-making on architecture: database selection, service boundaries, queue design, cost/performance trade-offs\- Experience driving observability and reliability at scaleTech Stack: Go, PostgreSQL, Terraform, AWS (ECS/Fargate, S3, SQS)Visa Sponsorship: H-1B transfers available. New H-1B sponsorship requiring the $100K USCIS fee is not available.\-------------------------------------------------------------LOGISTICSLocation: Austin, TXWork Policy: Fully in-office — 5 days/week\-------------------------------------------------------------