Staff Cloud Backend Developer at ALSO in Palo Alto, CA

About ALSO. We’re ALSO, an electric mobility company originally conceived as a part of Rivian. We’re a passionate team of builders, dreamers, doers and innovators, focused on creating entirely new (not to mention, innovative and delightful) vertically integrated, small EVs designed to meet the global mobility challenges of today and tomorrow. Our mission is to inspire everyone to ride ALSO—replacing many local car, truck and SUV miles with ones on vehicles that are more affordable, more enjoyable and 10-50x more efficient. As a Backend Developer on the Also backend team, you will drive technical excellence and architectural decisions for our core infrastructure that delivers an excellent customer experience on Also’s flagship connected EVs. You’ll lead the evolution of our connected EV platform, from secure data ingestion to product facing APIs, and influence how we build and scale at Also. You balance speed and rigor, know how to scale systems, and thrive in fast paced 0→1 environments. The systems you build will power core product features and enhance our analytics and fleet intelligence capabilities. What you will do: - Contribute to the architecture and implementation of backend systems to support secure, scalable IoT infrastructure for our fleet of connected EVs. - Drive improvements to core cloud infrastructure: API design, database schema, service interactions, event handling, observability, and deployment workflows. - Contribute to shared services for API gateway, caches, schema upgrades - Build data and API integrations with external services and partner platforms. - Strengthen security and privacy across the platform, including user authentication - Design and implement systems for high availability and geographic redundancy, ensuring reliability across global deployments. - Ensure production readiness with automated testing, performance monitoring, and deployment safety. - Partner with external agencies to scale team capacity effectively. - Mentor engineers and contribute to technical decision-making, hiring processes, and engineering best practices. - Drive and define a team culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning. What you will bring: - 10+ yrs building and scaling back-end systems, including at least one experience with the full lifecycle of managing remote devices. - Proven ability to design, ship, and operate production systems from scratch. - Experience with AWS (e.g. Lambda, ECR/ECS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM). - Strong knowledge of API design (REST/GraphQL), schema design, and data exchange (gRPC/JSON-RPC). - Strong knowledge of event-driven architecture and message queueing systems (e.g. Kafka, Redis, SQS/SNS, pub/sub patterns). - Experience with authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth2, OID, JWT, SAML, mTLS). - Familiarity with IoT protocols (MQTT, CoAP), device lifecycle management, and telemetry pipelines. The salary for this position ranges from $170,000 - $210,000 per year, depending on experience and qualifications. Why ALSO. We’re passionate about helping the world find a better way to get there—wherever it is you’re headed. We’re located in the heart of Silicon Valley and have brought together a world-class team from some of the biggest brands in the technology, automotive, cycling, outdoor recreation and retail spaces. Together we’re working hands-on to imagine, design and build an entirely new solution to a global set of transportation challenges.