Senior Backend Engineer — Real-Time Distributed Systems (NATS

Washington, California, Washington DC, or NYC

$145K–$275K + Equity

Kafka, NATS, gRPC, pub/sub

Build service layers that carry operator's command from a screen down to a drone in flight, & carries the live picture back up again. Everything else on this team the 3D command interface, the simulation engine, the agent layer, the software on the aircraft runs on the middleware you own.

Successful candidates owned a real-time service that other engineering teams built on top of! -

Candidates who have worked with NATS would be super interesting.

• Design and ship the cloud-and-edge middleware connecting four systems: onboard drone software, the 3D operator UI, the physics/simulation engine, and the LLM/agent layer
• Real-time data and messaging — streaming and pub/sub relaying data between many external services
• Scalable, reliable, fail-safe microservices where a crash is not an acceptable outcome
• Service registration and discovery across distributed deployments — knowing what is running where
• Ships to real field hardware as well as cloud (Docker, Kubernetes, edge)
• Prototype-to-field loop with customers in the room; mature services hand off to a core team, so you are repeatedly building foundations

• 4–10 years backend / service-layer engineering, currently hands-on (IC or player-coach of a small team)
• Built and owned middleware, APIs or microservices that joined multiple systems together — this is the signal we screen on
• Real-time data and messaging systems in production (Kafka, NATS, gRPC, pub/sub, streaming)
• Microservices at genuine scale FANG class consumer infrastructure.
• Strong in a modern backend or systems language — Rust, Python, C++ or Java. Team is Rust-primary but does not test for Rust; the coding screen is in your language of choice
• Shipped in a fast prototype-to-field environment (startup or startup-like)
• Autonomous systems, AV, robotics or real-time systems background a plus — LLM/agent tooling a plus, but not what this role is about

• US citizen, clearance-eligible. No sponsorship, and green-card holders are not eligible
• Based in or willing to relocate to Seattle, Palo Alto, Washington DC or NYC. Hybrid, with travel to deployment sites
• Still writing code daily this is not a director or architect-only seat