Senior Backend Software Engineer

Role: Senior Backend Software Engineer Location: San Diego, CA (in-office) Salary Range: $165,000 - $220,000 / yr + stock options, 401k matching, and other benefits Role Overview: Seasats' vehicles operate for months at a time, often thousands of miles from land, and every one of them is streaming telemetry, health data, and mission state back to shore. The backend systems that ingest, store, and serve that data are the backbone of how we operate our fleet, support our customers, and keep our vehicles safe. We're looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to help design and scale our systems to include real-time telemetry ingestion pipelines, APIs and services that power our fleet management platform and customer integrations. You'll help shape how Seasats' backend infrastructure evolves as our fleet, and the data it generates, grows. Role Details: As a senior member of the team, you'll help inform technical direction and raise the bar for how we build software at Seasats. On a day-to-day / week-to-week basis, you will: Design, build, and own backend services that ingest, process, and store real-time and historical vehicle telemetry at fleet scale Architect APIs that expose vehicle and mission data to internal tools, customer dashboards, and integrations, with an eye toward reliability and low latency Design data models and storage strategies for high-volume, time-series, and geospatial data Build systems that are resilient to the realities of maritime operations: intermittent connectivity, delayed or out-of-order data, and edge cases at sea Improve the scalability, observability, and reliability of existing backend services as fleet size and data volume grow Collaborate with the vehicle software and UI teams to integrate new data sources and capabilities Help inform technical direction and best practices for backend architecture, and mentor other engineers About You: 8+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with a track record of designing and scaling production systems Strong proficiency in Python Strong experience in security principles and implementation Deep experience designing REST and/or streaming (WebSocket, MQTT) APIs Strong experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and time-series/geospatial data modeling Experience with cloud infrastructure, including designing for reliability and cost at scale Experience with distributed systems concepts: queuing, caching, eventual consistency, and handling unreliable networks Demonstrated ability to independently scope and lead backend projects Strong technical communication skills Bonus points if you have: Experience building telemetry or IoT data pipelines for robotics, autonomous vehicles, or remote sensor fleets Familiarity with message queues/streaming platforms Experience with time-series databases (TimescaleDB, InfluxDB) or geospatial extensions (PostGIS) Experience with infrastructure-as-code and…