{"id":14959,"url":"https://alion.io/job/hedra-senior-backend-engineer","title":"Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems","company":{"id":4619,"name":"Hedra","domain":"hedra.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/hedra","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":175000,"max":275000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":275000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-21T21:18:56Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T23:24:00Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":149,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":148},"description":"About Hedra\nHedra is the platform, models, and infrastructure for visual intelligence.\nWe build the systems that make large-scale visual inference fast, reliable, and accessible to developers. Our work spans model serving, compute infrastructure, scheduling and routing, APIs, and the developer platform that sits on top of it.\nWe’re a small, highly technical team in San Francisco, backed by a16z and other leading investors. Engineers at Hedra work across boundaries, own systems end to end, and have significant influence over both what we build and how we build it.\nThe Role\nWe’re looking for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer with deep experience building and operating distributed production systems.\nYou’ll work on the infrastructure underlying Hedra’s inference platform: systems that schedule and route compute, serve models efficiently, handle high-throughput workloads, and remain reliable as both traffic and the number of models we support grow.\nThe problems are often ambiguous and don’t have obvious answers. We’re looking for someone who can reason from first principles, identify bottlenecks and failure modes before they become problems, and make thoughtful tradeoffs across performance, reliability, complexity, and cost.\nYou do not need to come from an AI company or already be an expert in model inference. We care much more about depth in distributed systems and your ability to apply that experience to a new problem space.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDesign, build, and operate distributed systems that power Hedra’s inference infrastructure.\n\nBuild systems for scheduling, routing, and managing compute-intensive workloads across heterogeneous resources.\n\nImprove throughput, latency, reliability, and resource utilization across our serving infrastructure.\n\nDesign systems that remain predictable and resilient under load, partial failures, changing capacity, and unpredictable workloads.\n\nOwn production systems end to end, including deployment, CI/CD, testing and validation, observability, monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.\n\nIdentify architectural bottlenecks and failure modes and drive solutions rather than waiting for problems to be fully specified.\n\nWork across infrastructure, model serving, APIs, and developer-facing systems as the platform evolves.\n\nUse modern agentic coding workflows as part of how you design, build, debug, and ship software.\n\nHelp shape the technical direction of a small engineering organization where individual engineers have substantial ownership.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\n5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building distributed backend or infrastructure systems.\n\nA track record of designing and operating high-availability production services at meaningful scale.\n\nStrong distributed systems fundamentals, including experience reasoning about concurrency, queues, retries, failure recovery, consistency, backpressure, capacity, and system behavior under load.\n\nExperience debugging complex production systems across multiple layers of the stack.\n\nStrong judgment around architectural tradeoffs, particularly reliability, performance, complexity, and operational cost.\n\nExperience with CI/CD, comprehensive testing and validation strategies, monitoring, alerting, and production operations.\n\nStrong programming fundamentals and experience working in systems-oriented backend languages. Python experience is helpful given our stack.\n\nExperience using agentic coding tools and workflows beyond basic prompting.\n\nComfort operating in an environment where problems are often underspecified and engineers are expected to independently determine the right approach.\n\nAbility to communicate technical decisions clearly and collaborate with engineers across infrastructure, research, and product.\n\nNice to Have\nExperience with inference or model-serving infrastructure.\n\nGPU or accelerator infrastructure.\n\nCompute scheduling, orchestration, or resource management.\n\nHigh-throughput or low-latency systems.\n\nKubernetes or other cluster orchestration systems.\n\nPerformance optimization and profiling.\n\nDeveloper infrastructure, APIs, SDKs, or platform engineering.\n\nExperience operating infrastructure across cloud and/or bare-metal environments.\n\nBenefits\nCompetitive compensation and equity\n\n401k\n\nHealthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)\n\nLunch and snacks at the office\n\nThis role is based in San Francisco, and we work together in person five days a week.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4469,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Generative Image","Generative Video","Generative Audio & Music"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-05-21T21:18:56Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":13,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.455,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":148,"expected_fill_days":36,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":275000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/hedra-senior-backend-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/hedra-senior-backend-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T00:27:06Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":848,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4619},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4619"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fhedra-senior-backend-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fhedra-senior-backend-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fhedra-senior-backend-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/hedra-senior-backend-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhedra-senior-backend-engineer"}]}