Senior Backend Software Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 7, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 6, 2026. Flexcompute scores A on the Alion truth index.
Flexcompute is leading the transformation of engineering simulation with our revolutionary ultra-fast simulation technology. Our flagship products, including the industry-leading Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software Flow360 and electromagnetic simulation software Tidy3D, are reshaping how simulations are conducted across diverse sectors. Founded by visionaries from Stanford and MIT and supported by top-tier venture capital firms, we are a rapidly growing team dedicated to breaking boundaries and challenging the norms of the multi-billion-dollar engineering simulation market.
Role Overview
We are looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our team in Madison, Wisconsin, and help us design and implement scalable solutions that meet the growing demands of our advanced EM simulation platform.
Additionally, the candidate will help us enhance our data management, frontend-backend API unification, and cloud integration.
Key Responsibilities
- Contribute to general software development efforts, such as API unification, simulation data management (e.g., caching, syncing, storage), and scripting improvements.
- Collaborate with EM and infrastructure teams to implement simulation-specific solutions, including enhancements to back-end/scheduler integrations and Python front-end functionality.
- Improve our task pipelines through an innovative design for a web API in a multi-physical simulation context.
- Develop and maintain hybrid cloud compute and storage solutions, integrating on-premise HPC systems with modern cloud platforms.
- Optimize and manage high-performance computing clusters equipped with high-speed interconnects
This is a senior seat. We keep the team small and senior on purpose, so you will own real pieces of the platform end to end, with little direction and direct access to the founders.
This role is on-site at our Madison office. Working from the office is a requirement: our product and application engineers are based in Madison, and this hire works alongside them in person. It is not a remote or hybrid role.
Requirements
What you need
- Strong backend engineering in at least one of Java, Python or C++. Deep in one is enough.
- Real production cloud experience, AWS preferred.
- Distributed systems you have operated in production, not only studied.
- Direct ownership of a production backend service, from design through deployment and operation.
- Fluent professional English, spoken and written.
- Able to work on-site at our Madison, Wisconsin office. This is required.
- Authorized to work in the United States.
- A bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering or a closely related field.
What you can learn here
We hire for depth, not checklists. You do not need all of the following on day one: Kubernetes and Docker, Terraform or Ansible, monitoring and observability tooling, Linux troubleshooting, networking and security practices, our simulation stack, and HPC (preferred, not mandatory). We look for people who have entered a new domain before, learned it fast and reached ownership.
Bonus
- Load balancing, autoscaling, and queues or streaming systems such as SQS, SNS or Kafka.
- Experience integrating cloud platforms with HPC environments or large compute clusters.
- Familiarity with job schedulers or batch systems, distributed compute frameworks, or large-scale data pipelines.
- Experience supporting scientific computing or simulation platforms.
- Knowledge of GPU infrastructure and resource scheduling.
- Experience building developer platforms or internal infrastructure tooling.
- A degree in computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, physics or a related field from a leading university. Hands-on production experience matters more than where you studied.
Innovative Mindset: Ability to learn quickly, adapt to new challenges, and innovate in a fast-paced startup environment.
Example Projects
- Architect and deploy infrastructure that runs distributed simulation workloads across cloud and on-premise compute
- Design and implement scalable web APIs for simulation job orchestration and data access
- Build CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code systems for reproducible deployments
- Develop hybrid cloud solutions connecting on-prem HPC clusters with AWS compute and storage
- Implement monitoring and observability systems to track simulation performance and reliability
- Improve platform scalability to support growing user traffic and compute demand
- Design secure service architectures, authentication, and licensing systems
- Optimize infrastructure utilization across CPU and GPU resources
Join Us
By joining Flexcompute, you'll be at the heart of a movement set to redefine the engineering simulation industry. You will play a key role in shaping the future, where our innovations in simulation technology pave the way for groundbreaking advancements. We are committed to fostering an innovative and collaborative culture where boundaries of possibility are re-imagined, driven by creativity, expertise, and a shared vision of transforming the technological landscape.
How we hire
No online assessment. Two to three technical conversations with the engineering team, then a final conversation with a co-founder. Bring your questions: the first conversation is not a pitch you sit through, you are welcome to send questions ahead, and technical disagreement is welcome.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary, plus RSUs granted on day one and vesting over four years.
- Medical, dental, and vision health insurance.
- 401(k) contribution.
- Flexible paid time off, all US national holidays, and a company-wide year-end break.
- $1,200 a year fitness stipend.
- Company-paid trips to our Boston headquarters to work with the core team.
- Learning sponsorship and an AI tools budget (we pay for Claude, Cursor and similar).
- Friendly, thoughtful, and intelligent coworkers.