About the Role
<p><strong>Scale Systems. Ship at Velocity. Own the Core.</strong></p><p><strong>Location:</strong> San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>The Mission</strong></p><p>Search Atlas hit <strong>$32M ARR bootstrapped</strong>. No VC. No safety net. Just systems that handle millions of crawls daily, terabytes of search data, and AI agents making autonomous decisions in milliseconds.</p><p>Our backend is the nervous system of agentic marketing. When our AI decides to optimize a Fortune 500's technical SEO, your code executes that decision. When we process 10x more pages next year, your architecture makes it possible.</p><p>We need a <strong>Staff Backend Engineer who codes like a senior IC and thinks like a founder.</strong> You'll own critical systems, mentor the team through shipping, and make architectural calls that define our trajectory.</p><p>This is high-ownership backend engineering at scale. San Francisco. In-person energy. Ship-or-die velocity.</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>What Winning Looks Like</strong></p><p><strong>Month 1:</strong> You've shipped performance optimizations that cut API latency by 30%. You know our PostgreSQL schemas, Celery task flows, and Kubernetes clusters better than the docs.</p><p><strong>Month 3:</strong> You've led a major architectural decision, maybe it's a new service extraction, a data pipeline refactor, or a critical path optimization. The team adopts your pattern.</p><p><strong>Month 6:</strong> You're the go-to technical authority for your domain. Engineers seek your code reviews. Product trusts your estimates. Your systems handle 10x load without breaking a sweat.</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>Your Arena</strong></p><p>You'll own backend systems for one of our core product verticals:</p><p><strong>Crawl Intelligence - </strong>Distributed systems processing millions of pages daily. Fault-tolerant queues, intelligent rate limiting, data pipeline resilience.</p><p><strong>AI Agent Infrastructure - </strong>The backend powering autonomous SEO agents. LLM orchestration, tool use APIs, reasoning state management, sub-100ms response requirements.</p><p><strong>Search Data Platform - </strong>PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch at scale. Query optimization, indexing strategies, real-time analytics pipelines.</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>The Work</strong></p><p><strong>Ship Performant Systems</strong></p><ul><li><p>Build and own Django REST applications that handle high-throughput, data-intensive workloads. Your APIs are fast, documented, and battle tested.</p></li><li><p>Design Celery task architectures that process millions of background jobs without dropping data. You understand idempotency, retry strategies, and dead letter queues.</p></li><li><p>Optimize PostgreSQL at scale. Query tuning, index strategy, connection pooling, partitioning - you don't just write ORM calls, you own database performance.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Architect for 10x</strong></p><ul><li><p>Make architectural decisions that scale from millions to billions of operations. Microservices extraction, data pipeline redesign, caching strategies, async patterns.</p></li><li><p>Contribute to platform-wide standards that make the entire engineering team faster and more reliable.</p></li><li><p>Review code with depth - you catch race conditions, N+1 queries, and architectural anti-patterns before they hit production.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Lead by Shipping</strong></p><ul><li><p>Mentor engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance. You elevate the team's output by elevating their craft.</p></li><li><p>Partner with Product, Frontend, and DevOps to deliver end-to-end features. You don't throw specs over walls; you co-own outcomes.</p></li><li><p>Drive engineering excellence: TDD, linting (Black, Flake8, isort), test coverage enforcement, CI/CD optimization.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Own Observability</strong></p><ul><li><p>Build systems you can debug at 3am. Sentry, Datadog, Grafana - you instrument everything, create actionable alerts, and fix root causes, not symptoms.</p></li><li><p>Identify performance bottlenecks across the stack. Profile, measure, optimize. Latency is a feature you own.</p></li></ul><div><hr></div><p><strong>You</strong></p><p>You've built backend systems that handle serious scale - and you can prove it.</p><ul><li><p><strong>7+ years</strong> shipping Python in production environments. Django REST Framework is second nature.</p></li><li><p><strong>Deep PostgreSQL expertise - </strong>query optimization, indexing strategies, replication, partitioning. You understand execution plans and lock contention.</p></li><li><p><strong>Celery at scale - </strong>task queue architecture, worker optimization, monitoring, and failure handling in high-volume environments.</p></li><li><p><strong>API craft - </strong>REST design, OpenAPI/DRF Spectacular, versioning strategies, backward compatibility.</p></li><li><p><strong>DevOps fluency - </strong>Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines. You don't need to be SRE, but you can debug a pod, optimize a build, and read Terraform.</p></li><li><p><strong>Observability mindset - </strong>Sentry, Datadog, Grafana. You build systems that tell you when they're breaking before users do.</p></li><li><p><strong>Leadership through code - </strong>mentoring experience, code review culture, technical decision-making that the team trusts.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Bonus:</strong> Experience with ClickHouse or analytical databases. Search infrastructure (crawling, indexing, ranking). AI/ML backend systems (LLM APIs, vector databases). MarTech or SEO domain knowledge.</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>The Stack</strong></p><p><strong>Core:</strong> Python 3, Django REST Framework, Celery, PostgreSQL<br><strong>Data:</strong> ClickHouse (analytics), Elasticsearch (search), Redis (caching)<br><strong>Infrastructure:</strong> Kubernetes, Docker, microservices architecture<br><strong>Observability:</strong> Sentry, Datadog, Grafana - we measure everything<br><strong>Scale:</strong> Millions of pages daily, terabytes of search data, sub-100ms latency requirements</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>The Deal</strong></p><p><strong>Compensation</strong></p><ul><li><p><strong>Base:</strong> $200K–$280K</p></li><li><p><strong>Benefits:</strong> Fully covered medical (Aetna), 99% dental/vision, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, $100/quarter dev budget, company-paid Lasik (2-year vest), pet insurance (Lemonade, 2 pets), 401(k) via Deel</p></li></ul><p><strong>The Opportunity</strong></p><ul><li><p>Hybrid in San Francisco. Deep collaboration, rapid iteration, technical sparring - this happens best in person.</p></li><li><p>We ship weekly. We optimize daily. We measure everything.</p></li><li><p>No staff engineers who don't code. No architecture without implementation. No mentorship without shipping alongside.</p></li></ul><div><hr></div><p><strong>The Company</strong></p><p>Search Atlas powers autonomous marketing for Fortune 500s and high-growth startups:</p><ul><li><p><strong>OTTO SEO - </strong>Fully autonomous technical optimization</p></li><li><p><strong>Content Genius - </strong>Semantic AI content generation</p></li><li><p><strong>Site Explorer - </strong>Real-time search intelligence</p></li><li><p><strong>BrandVault - </strong>AI-driven knowledge graphs</p></li><li><p><strong>GBP Galactic - </strong>Local SEO automation</p></li><li><p><strong>Smart Ads - </strong>Autonomous PPC management</p></li></ul><p><strong>Inc. 5000.</strong> <strong>Nevada's #1 Small Business Workplace.</strong> <strong>Great Place to Work Certified.</strong></p><p>Bootstrapped. Profitable. Growing fast. Building the future from San Francisco.</p><div><hr></div><p><strong>No cover letters. No generic applications. Just evidence of craft.</strong></p><p><strong>$32M ARR. Bootstrapped. Category-defining. San Francisco.</strong></p><p><em>Search Atlas is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members.</em></p><p><em>Must be currently authorized to work in the US without future sponsorship.</em></p>