Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

Verkada is expanding its core infrastructure to support the world's largest organizations through its physical AI security platform. The engineer will own the design and execution of authentication, user management, and audit systems that serve as the foundation for our product suite. This role requires building robust data primitives and control planes capable of handling extreme scale and complexity. You will develop distributed systems that reliably manage traffic flowing from over two million global devices in real time. The position involves deploying and maintaining new services within a modern microservices architecture to ensure high availability. Collaboration with cross-functional teams will be essential to align backend services with evolving product requirements. You will play a key role in ensuring security, performance, and scalability meet the demands of enterprise customers. This is an opportunity to solve challenging infrastructure problems that directly impact the reliability of a global security platform.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect data primitives and control planes for the entire product suite.
• Develop distributed systems capable of managing traffic from over 2 million global devices.
• Deploy and maintain new services within a microservices architecture.
• Design and implement authentication mechanisms that secure access for millions of users.
• Build and optimize user management systems to handle complex permissions and roles.
• Create audit systems that provide comprehensive visibility into platform activities.
• Develop APIs using GRPC and REST patterns to enable seamless service communication.
• Work with React engineers to ensure backend services align with frontend requirements.
• Maintain and scale relational databases such as Postgres and MySQL for critical workloads.
• Manage key-value stores like Redis and Memcached to optimize data access patterns.
• Implement and operate distributed queuing via Kafka to handle asynchronous workflows.
• Integrate services across AWS, GCP, and Azure to support hybrid cloud strategies.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to define API contracts and service boundaries.
• Ensure all backend services meet strict standards for performance, reliability, and security.

Requirements

• Hold a Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Computer Engineering.
• Bring a minimum of 4 years of professional industry experience in backend development.
• Demonstrate a background in scaling access systems for millions of users.
• Show proficiency in either Go or Python for building production-grade services.
• Provide experience with relational databases like Postgres or MySQL.
• Exhibit familiarity with key-value stores such as Memcached or Redis.
• Have experience with distributed queuing via Kafka for real-time data pipelines.
• Show proficiency with cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Demonstrate experience with React, GRPC, and API design principles.
• Communicate effectively with strong verbal and written skills in a technical context.
• Be able to work onsite five days per week at the San Mateo office.
• Have a proven track record of writing clean, maintainable, and well-documented code.
• Understand distributed systems concepts such as consensus, replication, and fault tolerance.
• Be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with evolving priorities.

Nice to have

• Experience contributing to open source projects relevant to backend infrastructure.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools for automated deployments.
• Knowledge of observability tools for monitoring distributed systems.
• Exposure to security protocols and compliance standards for enterprise systems.
• Experience with container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Understanding of data encryption and secure communication practices.
• Background in building CI/CD pipelines for backend services.
• Experience with performance testing and capacity planning for large-scale systems.

Practical notes

• Annual pay range: $170,000 to $260,000 USD.
• Compensation may include equity in the form of RSUs and discretionary bonuses.
• Visa sponsorship is available and the company will assist with the process for successful candidates.
• Benefits include 100% covered employee healthcare premiums, 80% family coverage, HSA/FSA options, mental health support, paid parental leave, fertility benefits, daily lunches, and commuter perks.
• Verkada is an equal opportunity employer.