Overview 

Carbon Direct is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to help build and scale the systems our customers rely on to overcome their carbon, climate strategy, and energy challenges.

This is a role for someone who brings deep technical ownership to the platform and thinks in systems: who can trace a piece of data from the pipeline that ingests it, through the services and contracts that transform and move it, out through the APIs that expose it, and all the way to how a customer ultimately consumes and relies on it.

You'll set technical direction and make sure the platform holds together as it scales, flexing across feature development, architecture, operations, and the developer experience that lets contributors outside engineering ship. You will operate at pace in an ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant environment where access control, data protection, and auditability are considered from the first commit.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and deploy robust backend services, data pipelines, and highly available APIs, owning the full path data takes through the platform.
• Prototype quickly to test hypotheses, deciding what to rework and what to discard.
• Harden validated prototypes, taking them through enterprise-scale adoption.
• Make sound architectural decisions with limited precedent, resolving weak points before they become customer-facing problems.
• Flex into devops and SRE work as the platform demands.
• Support the developer experience for AI-empowered contributors from non-engineering backgrounds, building the modules and guardrails that let them ship and maintain backend capability safely.
• Set technical direction and standards for backend engineering, mentor other engineers, and drive initiatives that span multiple services, pipelines, and teams.

What we're looking for

• Extensive professional experience as a backend engineer, with a track record of operating at staff level and setting technical direction with minimal oversight. 
• Vertical ownership. You have carried work from database schema through API and integration tests to the monitors that watch it in production.
• You ship high-risk changes with a rollback path, a test plan, and proactively coordinate with stakeholders to reduce and mitigate disruptions.
• Infrastructure fluency and reliability chops: infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and incident response experience.
• An innovator who uses agentic engineering tools in their daily workflow and has deployed AI-augmented software systems to production.
• A track record of building shared packages, tooling, and documentation that made the engineers and non-engineers around you faster.
• A team player who collaborates effectively with product managers, scientists, and customer-facing teams, translating their needs into technical solutions.
• Genuine interest in carbon, climate strategy, and energy is a strong plus.

Bonus points for

• Experience building or operating in a regulated environment (ISO 27001, SOC 2, or similar).
• Depth in production AI-augmented systems: durable execution for long-running agents, evals with quantified reliability thresholds, identity and scoped permissions carried through agent tool calls, and defense against prompt injection on untrusted context.

Why Carbon Direct

You'll join a mission-driven company where you can apply your skills to one of the most consequential problems of our time, with the agency and autonomy to build systems that don't yet exist and the responsibility to see them through to production.

Salary Range

$184,000-$225,000 a year