Backend Software Engineer

As a Software Engineer on the XCore team you will build and maintain the foundational systems that power every product at Backstory.ai — from identity and authorization to audit logging and BI data exports. You'll work in a focused, technically deep environment where your job is to write great software: designing low-latency APIs, building reliable data pipelines, and making complex distributed systems cleaner and more scalable over time. Backed by strong senior engineering leadership, you'll have the guidance and context you need to do your best work without the noise — letting you focus on growing your technical craft and delivering meaningful impact on systems the whole company depends on. What you will do: Build and maintain performant, low-latency APIs and distributed microservices handling identity, authorization, user profiles, settings, and product configurationsImplement and maintain data pipelines that move large volumes of data with consistency and reliability, including audit-log systems and BI data exportsMaintain and improve existing features based on user feedback and evolving product requirementsFollow and promote engineering best practices, including structured logging, cross-service request tracking, and robust error managementContribute to production observability through alerting, dashboards, and runbooksBuild tooling to reduce manual operations for engineering teams and support customer support self-service workflowsContribute to feature development end-to-end: from participating in requirement discussions with Product, through implementation, to production monitoring What you will bring: 3+ years of professional experience building backend systems in an enterprise environment1+ years of experience programming in Python or ScalaSolid understanding of microservices and service-oriented architectures (SOA)Familiarity with databases, caching strategies, and low-latency service designExperience building and consuming REST APIs with attention to reliability and client experienceExposure to data synchronization patterns and high-consistency data pipeline designAble to navigate and contribute to an unfamiliar codebase with guidance, working toward incremental improvementsAppreciation for automation and reducing manual operational toilExperience with Spark or big data processing is a plusGood communication skills with the ability to participate meaningfully in product and engineering discussions About Backstory.ai: Backstory helps companies understand the state of their revenue business by answering questions that span customer interactions, sales activity, pipeline health, and deal execution. The platform operates over trillions of sales activities, millions of deals, and more than 160 million business contacts, giving customers a unified view of the signals that drive revenue. Companies such as Nvidia, OpenAI, AMD, Red Hat, and Databricks rely on Backstory to surface risks, identify opportunities, and understand what's happening across their business. Backstory is building AI systems that reason over massive amounts of enterprise data to help business leaders understand what's happening in their business and what to do next. We work at the intersection of large language models, retrieval, evaluation, distributed data systems, and product design, turning billions of signals from across the enterprise into insights people can trust. The underlying challenges span reasoning, search, ranking, data quality, knowledge representation, and operating AI systems against continuously evolving real-world information. We value ownership highly — the ability to take an idea through all the stages from conception to shipping a product. This reflects throughout our company, but is especially true in engineering. As an engineer at Backstory, you'll be a part of a highly independent and autonomous team. Since we're building out a robust data layer that needs to be presented elegantly to the end-user, you'll be working with a large array of different technologies and fields. Expect lots of interesting challenges. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Backstory is backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley’s top investors, including ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Akkadian Ventures, and Mubadala Capital. Backstory is listed in the top 20 percent of Inc 5000 companies, is a regular leader in our key categories on G2, and is on the Forbes list of America’s Best Startup Employers. For more information, please visit www.backstory.ai. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.