Backend Engineer

Luminary helps engineering companies be more competitive by getting to market faster, creating new, better products, and reducing development risk. We do this with our Physics AI platform, the fastest and easiest way to build and deploy models to understand and instantly predict physical reality with precision. Customers span industries from automotive and aerospace, to leading sporting equipment providers, including Otto Aviation, Joby Aviation, Piper Aircraft and Trek Bikes. Luminary is a Series B company and is headquartered in San Mateo, California.

• Work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure the successful delivery of features and products.
• Implement, test, and maintain robust, scalable backend systems and APIs, ensuring high performance, reliability, and data integrity.
• Apply backend development best practices to ensure code quality, maintainability, security, and operational readiness.

• Develop and enhance our cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred) through automation and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Develop, oversee, and maintain operational systems—from deployment pipelines to orchestration layers—ensuring application health, reliability, and scalability using containerized solutions like Kubernetes.
• Execute scalability and performance optimization strategies to ensure systems efficiently handle increasing workloads.

• Contribute to the design and implementation of systems using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles, enabling independent, reusable services and microservices.
• Participate in architectural discussions that influence the platform’s long-term reliability, performance, and scalability.

• Collaborate with security experts to integrate IAM, authentication, authorization, encryption, and related best practices.
• Participate in on-call rotations/incident response, contributing to the operational reliability of our platform.
• Create and maintain documentation on system architecture, infrastructure, and security practices.

• 5+ years of experience building performant, scalable, distributed systems (or equivalent experience).
• 10+ years of experience required for Senior/Lead candidates.
• Proficiency in Golang and Python is highly desirable.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), CI/CD pipelines, and core SRE/DevOps concepts.
• Proven experience designing and implementing scalable SaaS backend systems.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and cloud automation.
• Strong understanding of operational practices and willingness to participate in on-call rotations.
• Knowledge of modern security principles and IAM fundamentals.
• A passion for staying current with backend, cloud, and infrastructure technologies.
  

• Demonstrated success scaling infrastructure in a startup environment, including multicloud, hybrid, or on-prem deployments.
• Proven experience mentoring and guiding engineers, supporting technical growth and career development.
• Ability to act as a technical architect, making high-impact design decisions for reliable, scalable, and secure platform systems.

• SaaS Platform Expertise: Experience building and scaling cloud-based SaaS platforms.
• Adaptability: Ability to learn and adopt new technologies quickly in a fast-moving environment.
• Teamwork & Communication: Strong communication skills, enabling effective collaboration and clear articulation of technical concepts.
  Entrepreneurial Spirit: Comfortable with ambiguity, adaptable to change, and energized by building in a rapidly evolving startup setting.