Software Engineer - Backend

The role

You will design and scale distributed systems for a cloud-based perception platform. You will build services, data pipelines, and infrastructure to process real-time video, sensor, and computer vision data.

What you will do

• Architect and implement scalable backend services and data pipelines.
• Design and optimize distributed storage and compute systems.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform in AWS.
• Build and operate Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Design relational and time-series data models in PostgreSQL.
• 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.
• Own the reliability of core backend systems, including on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.

Required 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.

About the company

Specter builds video sensors with AI agents to automate the physical world. The team is small and fast growing, with members from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.