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Zanskar is revolutionizing geothermal energy exploration using advanced software and machine learning to make geothermal a cheap and vital contributor to a carbon-free electrical grid. The company is setting new industry standards for discovery rates and finding new prospects at unprecedented scale.
As a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role developing and maintaining Zanskar's next-generation multi-physics well-targeting engine. You will lead the design and delivery of a reliable distributed compute system that meets the ongoing needs of scientific research teams, working with an existing system that needs to grow and scale for reliability and performance.
You will collaborate with geophysicists, geoscientists, seismologists, and engineers to solve hard problems in geothermal discovery. This is a teaching and learning role—you'll bring critical distributed systems expertise while learning domain knowledge from brilliant peers, and you'll help others understand your craft as they teach you about modeling the earth's subsurface.
Required qualifications include 7+ years of software engineering experience in a business environment, ideally with scientific computing components. You must have proven experience leading the design and implementation of distributed computing systems, including fault-tolerant event-driven architectures, orchestration systems for cloud-based workloads (serverless, Kubernetes, custom VM fleets), and persistent data storage solutions at scale (RDBMS and cloud blob storage). Strong system observability skills (logging, monitoring, alerting, metrics) are essential. You should be fluent in Python and SQL, with expertise in software engineering best practices: CI/CD (GitHub Actions), version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi). Cloud architecture experience with GCP or AWS is required.
Plus skills include experiment tracking, optimization methods, applied algorithm development, reinforcement learning, AI/ML techniques, web development, and familiarity with geoscience concepts. The role is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a hybrid position with full-time, salaried employment.
