{"id":818573,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sequen-staff-backend-engineer","title":"Staff, Backend Engineer","company":{"id":688868,"name":"Sequen","domain":"sequen.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/sequen","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":14,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":221000,"max_usd":375000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":512},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"kubectl","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"NLP","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-06T21:21:01Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T20:03:34Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":121,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":121},"description":"Staff Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems, Platform\nABOUT US Building the ranking intelligence layer for the internet.\nSequen provides an integrated platform that pairs cutting-edge frontier ranking models with the infrastructure to run them in production-at sub-25ms latency and enterprise scale. The world's largest retailers, marketplaces, and travel platforms use Sequen to rank, recommend, and personalize, with an autonomous research engine that compounds model performance into revenue and margin lift measured in hundreds of millions of dollars per customer.\nABOUT THE ROLE\nBuild the platform: Build and scale robust, concurrent core platform components designed to handle Sequen's rapid growth and high transactional throughput.\n\nArchitect composable systems: Design and architect composable platform components that deliver exceptional value across a wide variety of enterprise use cases.\n\nCollaborate across teams: Partner closely with product and ML engineering teams to deeply understand their requirements and build platform capabilities that accelerate feature delivery.\n\nDrive architectural decisions: Make critical build-versus-buy decisions, evaluating and implementing third-party or open-source solutions when they yield the highest strategic impact.\n\nSet technical vision: Define the long-term technical direction, standards, and vision for various product and platform features.\n\nPartner with research: Collaborate closely with our ML research scientists to quickly prototype and launch new capabilities based on research breakthroughs.\n\nABOUT YOU\nProven track record: Bring 8+ years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building highly performant, scalable distributed systems.\n\nGo language mastery: Possess an expert-level command of Go (Golang) as your primary programming language for building highly concurrent systems.\n\nService-oriented expertise: Demonstrate strong systems-level skills and extensive experience designing and operating complex service-oriented architectures.\n\nStartup DNA: Thrive in early-stage, fast-moving, or rapidly evolving environments, with a proven history of building and scaling systems from 0 to 1.\n\nExtreme ownership: Take absolute accountability for your work, navigating ambiguity with agility and proactively resolving obstacles to deliver results.\n\nSystem-wide comfort: Operate comfortably across any layer of the stack, diving into cloud infrastructure, core microservices, or developer tooling to deliver complete, effective solutions.\n\nPassion for AI systems: Enjoy working alongside a fast-paced, elite team tackling cutting-edge challenges at the intersection of systems engineering and AI ranking.\n\nProduct-focused mindset: Approach platform engineering with a product-focused lens, caring deeply about building systems that are robust, highly scalable, and easy to use.\n\nAcademic foundations: Hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.\n\nStrong Candidates May Also Bring\nPolyglot capabilities: Bring a firm grasp of Python for machine learning pipelines and scripting integrations.\n\nInfrastructure fluency: Know your way around container orchestration (kubectl, Kubernetes) and Infrastructure-as-Code (terraform).\n\nML alignment: Have worked directly with NLP and ML models, understanding their deployment patterns, performance capabilities, and operational limits.\n\nModern API design: Possess deep experience designing and implementing highly performant, secure RESTful and gRPC APIs.\n\nFull-stack exposure: Bring lightweight experience with React and modern frontend frameworks to help build internal diagnostics and visualization tools.\n\nWhat We Offer\nHigh-impact influence: A high-autonomy, staff-level Individual Contributor (IC) role directly shaping our core backend architecture and platform evolution.\n\nPioneering systems: The unique opportunity to build mission-critical, low-latency systems powering advanced ML experiences at enterprise scale.\n\nTop-tier reward: Highly competitive base salary, plus meaningful early-stage equity.\n\nPremium benefits: Full health insurance coverage, unlimited paid time off, and a highly collaborative, world-class engineering 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