Senior Backend Engineer

Key Beliefs

• We believe in in-person collaboration, internally and with customers/partners
• We believe meetings are for shaping/ problem solving, not status updates
• We believe in order to win, this is a team sport and hold one-another accountable to a high bar, publicly
• We believe in first principles and a beginner mindset
• We believe in a bias for action and speed
• We believe in doing the hard things and making trade-offs

Benefits + Perks

We value you at and outside of work and know your loved ones are important. Our benefits are designed to support you and your family’s health through life’s expected and unexpected events.

Our Benefits Include:

• Competitive Salary + Stock Options
• Health Care Coverage + Life Insurance (2X Salary)
• 401K Plan with Company match 
• Health Savings Account + Flexible Spending Account
• Flexible Vacation Policy
• Adaptable Working Schedule and Environment

Our Perks Include:

• Casual Dress Attire
• Hybrid work flexibility (2 days work from home)
• Catered Lunches, Snacks and Beverages
• Commuter Transit and Parking Plan
• Company Outings and Happy Hours
• Designated Volunteering Hours + Group Volunteer Events

Sight Machine is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers candidates regardless of age, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. Sight Machine also considers qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

About Sight Machine, Inc.

Sight Machine strengthens manufacturers by providing the industry’s best manufacturing AI and data platform, and system-level visualization capabilities. Our innovative platform integrates all critical data into a single, intuitive  platform, enabling everyone involved in the fabrication process to visualize, contextualize and analyze information seamlessly. Leveraging 3D technology and AI capabilities allows plant operators and managers to get real-time visibility into their manufacturing lines and AI/ML recommendations help improve production, yield and uptime. 

Sight Machine is committed and mission-driven to improve lives, strengthen communities and make the world cleaner by continuously re-envisioning  and improving manufacturing processes, making them more efficient, sustainable and absolute. Founded in Michigan in 2011 and expanded to San Francisco in 2012, Sight Machine blends the Silicon Valley spirit of technology innovation and the down to earth style of Detroit manufacturing. Together, we bring deep industry expertise and a shared commitment to advancing manufacturing towards a more sustainable future.

At Sight Machine, you will work with manufacturing leaders across industries including food & beverage, consumer packaged goods, automotive, packaging, etc. You will have access to vast amounts of factory floor data, learn how the products you use every day are made, using that knowledge to uncover insights into how customers manufacture products and develop solutions to critical business challenges. Our platform tackles complex problems, including Extract Transform Load (ETL), information retrieval, data aggregation and analytics, factory automation, distributed computing, security, and is leading the expansion into machine learning, agentic and physical AI applications.

We place great value on professional, technical, and personal growth in an inclusive, collaborative environment. The ideal candidate is passionate  about technology and brings a strong, can-do attitude. They must be able to work in a highly dynamic environment with a good degree of ambiguity. They believe in the company’s mission and are all-in to make themselves and the company successful.

Responsibilities

• Design, architect, and implement core services for our distributed, real-time data streaming platform, with a focus on correctness, reproducibility, and observability
• Take ownership of end-to-end quality from design through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operation
• Continuously improve and evolve our streaming data processing codebase, raising the bar on performance, reliability, and simplicity
• Monitor, diagnose, and resolve bugs, performance bottlenecks, and correctness issues in production systems running at scale
• Collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure teams to deliver highly concurrent, fault-tolerant processing workflows that meet SLAs
• Lead technical design reviews and mentor other engineers on best practices for high-performance, distributed systems

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience building robust backend systems in production
• Strong experience with Java or C++ building and optimizing highly concurrent, high-performance backend services
• Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems for real-time or large-scale data processing (streaming and/or batch)
• Experience working with data-intensive applications and pipelines that handle large volumes of data

Nice to Haves

• Experience with modern ETL / data-processing frameworks across both batch and streaming paradigms (e.g., SQL-based data pipelines, Kafka Streams, Flink, Spark, Beam, etc.)
• Experience building ETL processing for IoT / industrial devices, including ingestion and transformation of time-series sensor data from appliances
• Exposure to stitching time-series sensor data together, including cleaning, aligning and combining raw signals into usable digital features and downstream analysis
• Expertise with data warehousing and database internals (e.g., query execution, indexing and storage structures like B-trees and LSM trees)
• Experience testing distributed systems for performance, scalability, and accuracy
• Experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, AKS, ECS, etc) and cloud-native deployment patterns