Staff Backend Software Engineer

About the company

Carbon is a Silicon Valley additive manufacturing company that supplies hardware, software, and materials enabling large-scale 3D production of high-performance polymer parts.

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><div>At Carbon, our mission goes beyond 3D printing.&nbsp; We are enabling creators everywhere to make what the world needs, right now.&nbsp; Our company is built on the idea that diverse fields of study must come together to solve intractable problems. We have grand ambitions to create technology that will influence industry around the world. You will be joining a diverse team with a vibrant culture, where team success is as important as celebrating individual contributions.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Help us change the world and we will help you change yours.</div></div><p>Working at the intersection of hardware, software, and molecular science, Carbon delivers on the promise of 3D printing by helping commercial customers move beyond prototyping to produce real-world parts. Every one of those parts depends on a printer in a customer's factory staying online, up to date, and in perfect two-way conversation with our cloud.</p> <p>We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own the services that live on that seam between our cloud and our global fleet of printers. You will design and build the backend systems that provision, update, and communicate with printers in the field, own major initiatives end to end, and set a high bar for how we build Linux-based systems that have to be right the first time, on hardware we can not physically touch.</p> <h3>You will:</h3> <ul> <li><strong>Own the Services Behind the Fleet:</strong> Be a core owner of the backend services that manage printer identity, connectivity, provisioning, updates, and telemetry. You will keep them resilient and highly available as our fleet grows, and drive the design of new services that unlock new device capabilities.</li> <li><strong>Build the Linux Layer Underneath:</strong> Design and improve how our printers come up, install, and update, from initial bring-up through in-field OS updates and rollbacks. You will bring deep Linux fundamentals to bear on real problems in the field, where "reinstall the machine" is not an option.</li> <li><strong>Own the Network Between Cloud and Printer:</strong> Design the protocols, connections, and failure modes that keep a printer talking to our cloud reliably from anywhere in the world, including flaky networks, restrictive corporate firewalls, and long offline periods. You will care about latency, back-pressure, retries, and the boring reliability details that make the whole system feel solid.</li> <li><strong>Drive Major Initiatives End-to-End:</strong> Take full ownership of substantial backend initiatives, from design through production rollout on real printers. You will influence architectural decisions and help shape the long-term direction of the cloud-to-device platform.</li> <li><strong>Own Reliability Alongside the Team:</strong> Participate in on-call for the services you own, drive incident response and postmortems, and turn recurring pain into permanent fixes. You will help other teams operate the services that depend on yours.</li> <li><strong>Technical Leadership &amp; Mentorship:</strong> Work as a senior technical contributor across backend, infrastructure, and device teams. You will translate real product and operational needs into robust designs, raise the bar through design and code review, and mentor engineers around you.</li> </ul> <h3>You have:</h3> <ul> <li>8+ years of experience building and operating production backend services, with a track record of driving major initiatives end to end.</li> <li>Deep Linux fundamentals: processes, filesystems, networking, systemd, boot and init, package management, users and permissions, and the ability to debug production Linux problems from first principles.</li> <li>Strong networking skills: TCP/IP, TLS, DNS, HTTP, WebSockets, NAT and firewall traversal, and comfort reasoning about connectivity between services in the cloud and devices on customer networks.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with OS provisioning and lifecycle: installing, imaging, updating, and rolling back Linux systems in the field, including A/B update strategies or similar patterns.</li> <li>Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Python, Go, Node/TypeScript, C++, or similar), and comfort dropping into others when needed.</li> <li>A production mindset: you think about failure modes, blast radius, observability, and upgrade paths from the start, and you have carried a pager for systems you built.</li> <li>Strong communication, debugging, and problem-solving skills.</li> <li>Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.</li> </ul> <h3>Nice to have:</h3> <ul> <li>Experience building IoT or connected-device backends at scale.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with MQTT or similar pub/sub protocols in production, including broker operations, QoS trade-offs, and offline/reconnect semantics.</li> <li>Experience with fleet management, remote diagnostics, or OTA update systems.</li> <li>Familiarity with edge compute, embedded Linux distributions, or bring-up of new hardware.</li> <li>Familiarity with Bazel or another polyglot monorepo build system.</li> </ul> <p><em>You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply for this position. Here at Carbon, we know that diverse perspectives foster the innovation we need to be successful, and we are committed to building a team that encompasses a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills</em>.</p> <p>At Carbon, we look at the person holistically and carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining salary. The compensation bracket for this position is $209,600 - $314,400 (per year). In order to maintain equitable internal pay practices, we aim to hire new employees near the midpoint of $262,000, taking into account your experience, work location, certifications, and the unique skills you bring to the role. If you are not based in our Sunnyvale or Santa Clara, CA office, the range above will be adjusted