Backend Engineer - remote

Density Inc.
Posted 3 years ago
We Work Remotely
At Density, we build one of the most advanced people sensing systems in the world. The product and infrastructure is nuanced and one-of-a-kind. Building this product for scale has been an exercise in patience, creativity, remarkable engineering, laser physics, global logistics, and grit. The team is thoughtful, driven, and world-class.  

Importance of Engineering  

We build systems that are real-time, accurate, and anonymous by design. Our systems help today’s largest companies understand how their buildings get used. We have counted hundreds of millions of people.  

Counting people in “real-time” is unique and particularly hard to achieve. It allows a user to walk into a room, beneath our sensor, and see the room’s occupancy increment 700ms later.   

Today alone, Density will ingest over 1m events. In the coming year, our sensor network is on track to grow ten-fold. The overall system load is exploding. Maintaining our low latency standards requires an increasingly thoughtful system.  

We’re architecting infrastructure where annual, unscheduled downtime is measured in minutes. We’re building intelligent redundancies so missed events are an oddity. We’re constructing an exceptional engineering team to support always-on, intelligible analytics generated on the fly.  

Real-time can solve one of the world’s most fundamental problems -- how do humans use all this space? Last week we launched Safe by Density to help organizations safely return to the workplace. This product, a singular example, would not have been possible without real time data.   

This is a large, nuanced, deeply technical problem. We need your help solving it.   

You can read our values here.   

This role reports to our Director of Software Engineering. 

What we're looking for:


  • You have 5+ years experience shaping highly scalable enterprise systems. Or can demonstrate similar proficiency. 
  • You have a command of technologies like Time Scale DB, Redis, Kafka, Postgres, AWS, Django, and Python.
  • You have architected complex data pipelines, APIs, and data delivery mechanisms.
  • You have had significant senior responsibility for monitoring, profiling and improving system performance. 
  • You have demonstrated the ability to navigate the nuanced needs of internal tools and customer facing systems.
  • You can balance a demanding workload, discern priorities, and communicate tradeoffs effectively.
  • You are resourceful, direct, helpful, driven, and mission-oriented.
  • You have an understanding of statistical analysis and trend data modeling.
  • You have worked with container orchestration technologies like kubernetes or nomad.
  • You embrace the opportunity to share your knowledge. 
  • You have a working knowledge of front end technologies like ES6, React, and Redux. 
  • You have an excitement for and ability to interact directly with customers. 
  • You have an awareness of your weak spots and a genuine desire to improve. 
  • You’re looking for a long-term role with a company that has long-term ambition.