Senior Backend Engineer

We make software that finds the bugs your engineers couldn't. Antithesis runs your entire system in a deterministic simulation, breaks it in every way imaginable, and hands you a root cause and a perfect reproduction — no flaky tests, no false positives, no "works on my machine." We've been quietly reinventing how the world thinks about software reliability, and we're just getting started.

The rise of AI-generated code has made what we do more important than ever. Agents can write code faster than any human — but faster code isn't better code if it's buggy, stuck in review, or slipping through the cracks undetected. The verification bottleneck is real, it's growing, and it's exactly the problem we exist to solve.

We're well-funded, deeply technical, and building something genuinely hard. If that sounds like fun to you, keep reading.

The Platform team is the engine room of Antithesis — we own the infrastructure, services, and tools that are at the core of the product. As a Senior Backend Engineer here, you won't be maintaining someone else's abstractions. You'll be designing them from scratch, owning them end-to-end, across the full stack: from raw binary formats and block compaction all the way up to the external APIs our customers depend on. Correctness and performance aren't nice-to-haves here — they're the job.

If you get unreasonably excited about systems design, performance, storage efficiency, clean API contracts, and finding the bottleneck nobody else noticed, we'd love to talk.

• Design, build, and operate core platform systems — including backend infrastructure, data processing pipelines, storage layers, and the scalable APIs, integrations, and interfaces that power internal and external consumers.

• Contribute to Pangolin, our purpose-built database designed from the ground up to meet the unique demands of our platform.

• Build and evolve foundational platform primitives such as data access layers, authorization frameworks, and service orchestration.

• Own reliability end-to-end — from system design and capacity planning to incident response, with a sustainable on-call rotation shared across the team.

• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across the stack; mentor engineers; contribute to long-term technical strategy.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience. Rust is a strong preference, but exceptional systems engineers from other backgrounds are welcome.

• Experience building APIs, services, storage engines, query engines, or data-intensive backend systems.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems: consistency, fault tolerance, replication, observability.

• Hands-on experience designing and shipping APIs with attention to correctness and contract stability.

• Strong fundamentals — you care about correctness, test coverage, and well-designed abstractions.

• Bonus: query planning/optimization experience, multi-tenant platform or authz background, C/C++ familiarity, or open-source contributions.

Our team has backgrounds spanning CS degrees, philosophy, mathematics, and everything in between — or nothing formal at all. What everyone shares is a high bar for engineering quality, regardless of title. We work in-person because it's how we build trust and tackle hard problems together.

Location: This position is in office in Vienna, VA.