{"id":134515,"url":"https://alion.io/job/scispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2","title":"Senior Backend & Infrastructure Engineer","company":{"id":179617,"name":"Scispot","domain":"scispot.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/scispot-2","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US","IN","DE","GB","CA","PL","ES"],"hiring_countries_total":7,"salary":{"min":100000,"max":175000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":175000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Azure Cosmos DB","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Langfuse","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-27T12:20:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T00:20:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"description":"Build the technical backbone for labs that run themselves.\nThis is a hands-on backend and infrastructure role. You will write production code, make architecture choices, and own systems from design through deployment, monitoring, and incident response.\nWhy Scispot\nScispot began after my brother Guru and I (Satya) watched someone they loved run out of time while slow, manual lab processes delayed a promising treatment. We are building Scispot so life-saving science can move at software speed.\nBiotech & Lifescience teams should not have to choose between moving fast and keeping their data clean, connected, traceable, and ready for AI.\nWe are building the digital backbone for scientific discovery. Scispot connects lab operations, instrument data, scientific workflows, and AI-driven insights in one platform. This becomes the memory layer for lifescience teams for their agents.\nYour code will not optimize clicks for another consumer app. It will help scientists run experiments faster, trace samples accurately, automate repetitive work, and move treatments closer to patients.\nThis is a rare chance to build infrastructure at the intersection of software, AI, data, and biology.\nToday, Scispot supports more than 100 labs, 250+ instrument types, over 1,000 experiments each month, and millions of samples. After raising an $8M Series A, we are expanding the engineering team to build the reliable platform beneath the next generation of lab automation and AI\nThe role\nWe are looking for a senior backend and infrastructure engineer who treats production as a product.\nYou will own the systems beneath Scispot: backend services, messaging, databases, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, security, and reliability.\nThis is not an ops-only role.\nA normal week may include:\nTracing a RabbitMQ bottleneck.\nBuilding a FastAPI or Spring Boot service.\nTuning PostgreSQL or ElasticSearch.\nImproving an EKS rollout.\nDesigning a safer AWS and Azure boundary.\nReducing cloud cost without weakening reliability.\nDebugging a production issue across code, queues, caches, and infrastructure.\nOptimising the workload for AI pipelines\nYou will work closely with the founders and product engineers.\nYou will get broad goals, real customer stakes, and room to decide how to solve the problem. We want someone who acts like an owner, not someone who waits for a perfect ticket.\nWhat you’ll own\nDesign, build, and operate cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure for scale, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.\nBuild and evolve backend services in Python and FastAPI, Java and Spring Boot, or closely related frameworks.\nOwn backend reliability and performance across services, dependencies, queues, caches, databases, and external integrations.\nBuild and improve CI/CD pipelines so the team can deploy quickly, safely, and with clear rollback paths.\nRun production end to end. This includes deployments, monitoring, alerting, debugging, incident response, post-incident follow-up, and capacity planning.\nDesign event-driven and asynchronous workflows using RabbitMQ or similar messaging systems.\nUse Redis and other caching patterns to improve latency, throughput, and resilience.\nOperate relational data stores in RDS, graph workloads in Cosmos DB, and NoSQL or vector workloads in MongoDB Atlas.\nBuild useful observability with logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts using tools such as Datadog and ELK.\nImprove network and application security. This includes VPC design, secrets management, access control, encryption, and auditability.\nTurn repeated operational work into code, tools, runbooks, and guardrails that raise developer velocity.\nMake clear trade-offs among speed, reliability, maintainability, compliance, and cloud cost.\nProblems you may work on\nHow do we absorb bursts of instrument and workflow data without losing work, creating duplicates, or slowing customer-facing services?\nHow do we preserve sample lineage, permissions, and audit history as data moves across services and cloud systems?\nHow do we make graph and vector retrieval dependable enough to support AI features used in real lab workflows?\nHow do we let engineers ship many services quickly while keeping deployments observable, reversible, and safe?\nHow do we scale across AWS and Azure without building fragile one-off infrastructure or wasting cloud spend?\nHow do we find production risks before customers do, then remove the root cause instead of only treating the symptom?\nWhat success looks like in your first 90 days\nFirst 30 days\nMap the architecture, critical customer flows, deployment path, data stores, and main production risks.\nShip at least one useful production improvement in a backend service, deployment workflow, observability path, or reliability issue.\nJoin incident response and learn the current operating model.\nEstablish a baseline for the system health metrics that matter most.\nUnderstand all AI traces leveraging langfuse and suggesting the feedback pipeline for AI workloads\nBy 60 days\nBecome the clear owner of at least one service or infrastructure domain.\nRemove a meaningful bottleneck or source of operational risk in messaging, caching, databases, deployments, or cloud infrastructure.\nImprove CI/CD, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, or automated recovery so the team can move faster with less production risk.\nBy 90 days\nLead and launch a major backend or infrastructure initiative from design through production rollout.\nShow a measurable gain in reliability, developer speed, performance, cloud cost, or incident reduction.\nPresent a practical roadmap for the next two quarters, including the highest-leverage technical risks, trade-offs, and milestones.\nWhat we’re looking for\nRoughly 3+ years of experience building and operating backend, platform, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure systems. Strong evidence matters more than a precise year count.\nStrong production backend experience with Python and FastAPI, Java and Spring Boot, or a comparable stack.\nA solid grasp of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, failure modes, retries, idempotency, and message-driven architecture.\nHands-on experience with AWS and Azure. You have made practical decisions about networking, compute, storage, identity, security, and cost.\nSolid understanding of AI pipelines, prompt looping, langfuse tracing, and context engineering.\nExperience with Docker and Kubernetes. Production EKS experience is especially useful.\nStrong database fundamentals across relational systems such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.\nExposure to graph, NoSQL, or vector data systems.\nExperience designing and consuming REST APIs.\nExperience operating services that other teams or customers depend on.\nProven ownership of systems from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, debugging, and optimization.\nStrong production debugging and performance-tuning skills.\nThe ability to move from a symptom to the root cause across application code and infrastructure.\nGood security instincts around secrets, access control, network boundaries, data protection, and regulated environments.\nClear written and verbal communication. You explain trade-offs, surface risks early, and leave systems easier for others to operate.\nStrong pluses\nInfrastructure as code with Terraform or a similar tool.\nDatadog, ELK, OpenTelemetry, or another observability stack.\nMicroservices and event-driven systems at meaningful production scale.\nVector search, AI infrastructure, or LLM-powered applications.\nSecurity, compliance, audit trails, or regulated software environments.\nExperience in an early-stage startup where you operated beyond a narrow job boundary.\nLife-science, lab, healthcare, manufacturing, or other data-heavy workflow experience.\nBuilding short term or long term memory layer using databases that work well with agents.\nOur stack\nPython, FastAPI, Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, RabbitMQ, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, Cosmos DB, MongoDB Atlas, Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, AWS, Azure, Terraform, Datadog, and ELK.\nYou do not need every exact vendor on day one.\nYou do need strong backend and systems fundamentals, recent hands-on production work, and the ability to learn the missing pieces quickly.\nWhat high agency means here\nYou do not wait for a detailed ticket when the system, customer impact, and goal are clear.\nWhen production breaks, you help diagnose it, mitigate it, communicate clearly, and prevent a repeat.\nYou can choose a practical first version without creating a dead end.\nYou challenge weak assumptions with data and propose a better path.\nYou care about the outcome after launch, not only whether the code merged.\nYou make the engineers around you faster through tools, documentation, feedback, and sound technical judgment.\nThis role is probably not for you if\nYou want to work only in application code or only in cloud configuration. This role spans both.\nYou need requirements to be complete before you can start making progress.\nYou prefer handing production issues to another team once your code is deployed.\nYou avoid on-call work, incident response, or the operational side of software.\nYou optimize for elegant abstractions before proving that they solve the real problem.\nYou want the narrow boundaries and long approval chains of a large company.\nWhy join Scispot\nBuild systems that sit between physical lab work and AI-driven action. Reliability here has a direct effect on how fast scientists can work.\nOwn important production systems early. Your decisions will shape the platform rather than disappear into a large org chart.\nWork directly with founders and a small team that values speed, precision, clear thinking, and honest feedback.\nSolve hard problems across backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, distributed data, security, and developer experience.\nJoin at a stage with real customer usage and fresh capital, while the technical foundation is still open to meaningful change.\nHow to apply\nAlong with your resume or YC profile, tell us about one production system you personally owned.\nIn a few bullets, explain:\nWhat the system did and what was at stake.\nWhat was unclear or broken when you took ownership.\nThe key technical choices you made.\nThe trade-offs you considered.\nA production failure or hard constraint you had to work through.\nThe result for users, reliability, speed, cost, or the engineering team.\nLinks to code, technical writing, architecture notes, open-source work, or a product you shipped are welcome.\nWe care more about clear evidence of ownership than employer prestige or polished interview language.\nJoin Scispot if you want to build like a founder, remain close to users, and apply software and AI to problems that matter beyond software. You will have high autonomy, direct feedback, hard technical problems, and a visible link between what you ship and how quickly scientists can do their work.\nScreening call followed by live interview","description_format":"text","description_chars":10922,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"India","iso":"IN","kind":"country"},{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"},{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"},{"name":"Poland","iso":"PL","kind":"country"},{"name":"Spain","iso":"ES","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Custom Software Development","Scientific & Lab Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-27T12:20:32Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.261,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":50,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":175000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/scispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/scispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T01:00:40Z","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":1642,"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":179617},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=179617"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fscispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2"},{"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%2Fscispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2"},{"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%2Fscispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2"},{"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/scispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fscispot-senior-backend-infrastructure-engineer-2"}]}