Backend Founding Engineer Backend Founding Engineer San Francisco​/Remote San Francisco​/Remote

Sawmills is the first smart telemetry management platform, designed to handle the explosion of telemetry data generated by modern distributed systems. By integrating deeply with Open Telemetry and cloud-native infrastructure, Sawmills AI enables teams to reduce observability cost, improve data quality, and safeguard realibility.

• Lead design/development of Telemetry Data Management Platform
• Craft scalable backend systems that integrate with open technologies (Open Telemetry)
• Develop/scale backend of Telemetry Data Management Platform [emphasizing compatibility with open technologies (Open Telemetry)]
• Write complex SQL queries, tuning db performance (indexes/partitions)
• Use streaming algorithms (Count-Min-Sketch, Hyper Log Log ) for high cardinality solutions
• Architect systems that process/analyze vast amounts of machine data
• Participate in strategic planning/development of technical roadmaps
• Work with founders to ensure features meet customers' needs
• Collaborate with team to enhance integration with widely-used observability tools
• Serve as advocate for/implement best practices in open-source software development
• Contribute to open-source community
• Design/implement end to end CI/CD pipelines (Git Hub Actions, Argo CD) to automate testing, security scans, zero downtime releases
• Develop Terraform infrastructure as code modules to provision/manage multi account AWS environments
• Work with instrument services (Open Telemetry SDKs)
• Define logs/metrics/traces standards to ensure comprehensive observability
• Conduct performance profiling/load testing (k6, Locust) to validate system scalability to multi petabyte data volumes
• Implement blue green and canary deployment strategies (AWS EKS) to minimize rollout risks
• Perform prototype tiered storage/compression strategies (S3 + Glacier, Parquet, ZSTD) to optimize long term data retention costs
• Lead threat modeling, IAM least privilege design, secret management efforts to harden platform security
• Build internal developer tooling/SDKs (Go /Type Script) that speed micro service bootstrapping/ enforce coding standards
• Manage semantic versioning/release lifecycle of core platform components, ensuring backward compatibility
• Coordinate incident response, root cause analysis, post mortem documentation to drive reliability improvements
• Evaluate/integrate third party data platforms (Snowflake, DuckDB, Vector) through technical proofs of concepts
• Author technical blogs, conference talks, webinars to promote company thought leadership in observability
• Oversee vendor assessments/contract negotiations for critical infrastructure services
• Mentor/coach junior engineers via code reviews, pair programming, individualized growth plans
• Stay abreast of new technologies/techniques in backend development/observability platforms

• Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Software Engineering, plus 5 years of progressive experience.
• Experience to include:
  • Designing relational databases/async communication between microservices (Redis/message queue)
  • Writing complex SQL queries, tuning db performance (indexes/partitions)
  • Developing End2
    
    End features (K8s, Redis, Postgres, Python, AWS tools)/new AI products (RAG, LLMs)/micro-services (GO, React over AWS EKS, RDS, Kafka, gRPC)
  • Using streaming algorithms (Count-Min-Sketch, Hyper Log Log ) for high cardinality solutions