Software Engineer, Backend (Platform)

About the role

We are looking for a Senior or Staff-level software engineer to join our Backend Platform team.

Our team is responsible for building and maintaining Hex's core compute platform, which serves as the fundamental engine for all code execution, SQL querying, and data processing across the Hex application. Our platform powers everything from the core notebook interface and published applications to the complex data capabilities required by our AI agents.

Our mission is twofold: to make the compute platform exceptionally easy to use, develop on, and monitor, while also ensuring it is blazingly fast and performant. Engineers on this team operate at the challenging and rewarding intersection of systems architecture, API design, and deep performance optimization.

What you will do

On the Backend Platform team you’ll work on projects with high technical complexity and spanning across the stack, from our backend data systems to the frontend of Hex’s collaborative notebook interface.

Here are some examples of the kinds of projects you might tackle:

• Using DuckDB to enable seamless data interoperability between Python and SQL code written by our users or AI agents
• Building intelligent caching systems to speed up customer data queries
• Implementing a graph-based dependency framework for optimizing multi-step execution plans
• Instrumenting complex, multi-language systems to identify performance bottlenecks
• Building visualizations into the product to help users understand the performance characteristics of their code

About you

• 6+ years of engineering experience working on complex, data-driven systems or applications
• Expert-level understanding of Python, SQL, jupyter kernels, and/or data warehousing systems
• Deeply informed on industry trends around data processing, databases, and performant data architectures
• You love diving into highly complex codebases and have a passion for designing elegant abstractions that improve correctness and developer productivity
• An inexhaustible desire to understand where every millisecond of time could be going
• An instinct for strategic thinking and aligning with business and product goals while keeping a healthy balance of velocity and engineering excellence.
• Experience working in a remote-first team and strong communication skills in this context.

Our stack

Our product is a web-based notebook and app authoring platform. Our frontend is built with Typescript and React, using a combination of Apollo GraphQL and Redux for managing application state and data. On the backend, we also use Typescript to power an Express/Apollo GraphQL server that interacts with Postgres, Redis, and Kubernetes to manage our database and Python kernels. Our backend is tightly integrated with our infrastructure and CI/CD, where we use a combination of Terraform, Helm, and AWS to deploy and maintain our stack.