Software Engineer - Backend at Specter in San Francisco, CA

Company BackgroundSpecter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

**The Role**Specter is hiring a backend engineer to design and scale the distributed systems that power our cloud-based perception platform. You'll build the services, data pipelines, and infrastructure that ingest, process, and serve real-time video, sensor, and computer vision data at scale. This role sits at the foundation of Specter's product stack—owning the reliability, performance, and scalability of the backend systems that everything else is built on.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and implement scalable backend services and data pipelines for high-throughput, real-time streams of video, sensor, and detection data.
• Design and optimize distributed storage and compute systems for low-latency data access and high availability.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform to manage cloud resources in AWS.
• Build and operate Kubernetes-based deployments with a focus on reliability, observability, and efficient resource utilization.
• Design relational and time-series data models in PostgreSQL, optimizing for ingestion throughput and query performance.
• Develop event-driven architectures using Kafka, SQS, or similar messaging systems.
• Collaborate with perception and full-stack teams to define API contracts and data flow designs across real-time and analytical workloads.
• Own the reliability of core backend systems, including on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.

Qualifications:

• Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Deep proficiency in Python, Go, or Node.js with a solid foundation in systems-level thinking.
• Extensive experience with AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, SQS, Lambda, VPC networking).
• Hands-on experience with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills—schema design, query optimization, and migration strategies.
• Experience with containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD automation.
• Familiarity with event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent).
• Solid understanding of networking, security, and identity management in cloud environments.
• Interest in physical AI, IoT, or large-scale distributed sensing systems.