Backend Engineer, Data Systems (Modeling & Simulation)
About Code Metal
Code Metal is redefining code translation for mission-critical industries, helping defense partners move more quickly and reliably from algorithm to silicon. Our platform accelerates deployment of DSP, RF, communications, and embedded signal processing algorithms onto heterogeneous compute targets, including GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and edge SoCs. We also support automotive, aerospace, and semiconductor partners deploying complex algorithms onto constrained hardware with speed and rigor.
About the Role
Our Modeling & Simulation team is building the next-generation wargaming and decision-support platform that helps the DoW make multi-billion-dollar force-design decisions before those decisions are made in the real world. The team spans simulation and physics, backend and data systems, frontend and geospatial visualization, and AI systems, working together to turn operational questions into extensible, mission- and campaign-level simulations that government users can trust.
In this role, you will help design and build the core data foundations of our platform. This role is for an engineer who is deeply comfortable translating complex real-world concepts into clean relational data models, durable SQL schemas, clear data contracts, and maintainable backend services. You will work at the intersection of backend engineering, data architecture, and domain modeling. Scope of ownership, architectural authority, and mentorship responsibility scale with level - see “Level Expectations by Track” below.
A major focus of this position is building systems where business rules and operational logic that can be expressed through data structures and database-backed rules, rather than being hardcoded exclusively in application logic. You will help shape how we represent entities, relationships, constraints, validation rules, ingested data, and derived logic across the product. This is not a traditional analytics or BI data engineering role - it is a product/backend engineering role with a strong data systems focus.
What You’ll Do
Design and evolve relational data models that represent complex domain concepts, entities, relationships, and workflows.
Build and maintain SQL schemas, constraints, indexes, migrations, and query patterns that support scalable backend systems.
Define and enforce data contracts between services, APIs, ingestion pipelines, and downstream consumers.
Develop ingestion and normalization workflows for structured, semi-structured, and external source data.
Move business logic from ad hoc application code into well-modeled, extensible data structures, including configurable rules, eligibility/feasibility checks, mappings and lookup tables, domain-specific constraints, and decision logic represented in data.
Partner with product, domain experts, and engineers to convert ambiguous or evolving requirements into clear data abstractions.
Build backend services and APIs that expose, validate, and operate on these data models.
Improve the consistency, traceability, and maintainability of data across the system.
Help establish patterns for versioned data models, schema governance, data validation, audit-ability, and backward-compatible contracts.
Participate in architecture discussions and code reviews, especially where data modeling decisions have long-term consequences.
Required Qualifications:
Strong professional experience as a backend software engineer working on production systems.
Deep experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL or similar systems.
Strong ability to design normalized schemas, associative/relationship tables, constraints and validation logic, enum/lookup models, and lifecycle-aware data structures.
Strong SQL skills, including complex joins, aggregation, CTEs, views or materialized views where appropriate, and query performance awareness.
Experience defining or working with data contracts between services, APIs, and persistence layers.
Experience building or maintaining data ingestion, transformation, or normalization workflows.
Ability to reason carefully about business rules, edge cases, and how domain logic should be represented in software.
Strong programming ability in Python.
Experience working with ORMs and migration frameworks such as SQLAlchemy, Alembic, or comparable tools.
Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating with engineers, product stakeholders, and domain experts.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience designing rule-driven systems, policy engines, feasibility checks, or configuration-driven business logic.
Experience deciding when logic belongs in application code, SQL/database structures, rules tables, or services/domain layers.
Experience modeling complex operational domains such as simulations, logistics, planning systems, geospatial systems, defense, aerospace, or other highly structured data environments.
Experience with PostGIS or geospatial data, event-driven systems, versioned datasets or snapshots, data lineage/provenance, or imported external datasets with inconsistent or incomplete source quality.
Familiarity with API schema design and typed contracts, such as Pydantic, JSON Schema, protobuf, or OpenAPI.
Level Expectations by Track
This role is open at Senior, Staff, or Principal level. The expectations below (from the CodeMetal Engineering - Functional Competencies framework) describe how scope, ownership, and technical leadership differ by level; candidates are evaluated against the level they are hired into.
Senior (P3 · Established)
Years of Experience: 5+
Engineering Craft & Code Quality: Writes clean, idiomatic, well-tested code and follows best practices; drives debugging of the team's hardest issues; ensures AI-assisted work is correct, modular, and fully tested.
Architecture & Technical Knowledge: Designs and implements changes to single systems, collaborates on larger designs, and drives architecture reviews for multi-developer projects.
Delivery, Scoping & De-risking: Works with Product to scope and de-risk work; provides reliable estimates for medium-sized projects with clear risk communication.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship: A go-to technical reviewer for the team's codebase; mentors and onboards teammates; contributes to interviews and candidate experience.
Staff (P4 · Advanced)
Years of Experience: 7+
Engineering Craft & Code Quality: Defines and enforces the team's testing strategy, standards, and quality bar; ensures AI-generated output is tightly integrated into existing paradigms and robustly tested.
Architecture & Technical Knowledge: Designs cross-cutting changes across the stack; provides architectural guidance across the team; owns design docs for major multi-service or multi-surface projects.
Delivery, Scoping & De-risking: Owns technical scoping and execution strategy for complex, multi-sprint initiatives; audits requirements for technical risk and hidden dependencies before development begins.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship: The primary technical gatekeeper for the team's codebase; reviews most high-impact work; leads technical grooming, design spikes, and RFCs; coordinates across pods when changes cross domain boundaries.
Principal (P5 · Strategic)
Years of Experience: 10+
Engineering Craft & Code Quality: Sets the quality and correctness bar across the department; their work is the example others learn from; improves the automated systems and practices that ensure quality department-wide.
Architecture & Technical Knowledge: Provides architectural guidance across the department and invents paradigms that solve CodeMetal-specific domain problems (e.g., translation, optimization, deployment across target environments); a key resource on every major system.
Delivery, Scoping & De-risking: A consistent contributor to the company's technical roadmap; gives reliable estimates for large cross-team initiatives; ensures pragmatic scoping toward the most valuable outcomes.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship: An active driver of company-wide architectural reviews and proposals; mentors mid-level and senior staff at scale; influences others across departments toward the best technical outcome.
Benefits
Pay depends on experience, but we strive to be at the upper end of the salary range
Health care plan with 100% premium coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
401k with 5% matching
Paid Time Off (uncapped vacation, plus sick and public holidays)
Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement
Relocation assistance for qualifying employees
Wage Transparency - The salary range for this role is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, as the final offer amount may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, individual proficiency, skills, experience, and location.
We are an equal opportunity employer. US Citizenship may be required for certain project assignments involving security clearance.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.