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Osmo is a digital olfaction company developing AI-powered technology to give computers a sense of smell, with applications across fragrance, manufacturing, security, medicine, and other industries. The company is headquartered in Elizabeth, NJ with an office in Somerville, MA.
You would join as Staff Backend Engineer for the Data Platform team, which owns the company's canonical data model, knowledge graph, APIs, integrations, and management console. This role is a technical leadership position focused on architecting the platform through a critical growth phase where more domains, systems, and consumers depend on the data model.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning consistency across distributed systems that each maintain their own data copies, handling retries, reordering, and partial failures from upstream ingestion through routing to destinations
- Leading canonical schema design and evolution while systems actively read and write through the model, including migrations, versioning, and reference data with effective dating for auditability
- Defining system architecture including systems of record, ownership boundaries, replication strategy, and access control
- Designing the write path to handle concurrent automated and human writes with conflict resolution, validation, permissions, and complete audit history
- Setting data modeling standards and serving as the consulted expert before shared entities change
The strongest candidate will have been accountable for a shared data model that multiple teams depended on—getting agreement on concept definitions, encoding them in schema, and maintaining consistency across systems with their own copies under failure conditions.
Required expertise includes depth in asynchronous and event-driven service design (idempotency, concurrency control, integration patterns); advanced data modeling and schema design with temporal and audit requirements; sound judgment on technical debt with clear tradeoffs; demonstrated impact on team capability and standards; strong partnership with domain experts; and hands-on Python proficiency with Postgres, BigQuery, GCS, and containerized services on Cloud Run.
Nice-to-have experience includes establishing data standards in organizations without them and collaborating with scientific or technical domain experts to translate vocabulary into data models.
Osmo uses AI coding tools heavily and expects engineers to apply them with good judgment. The company offers competitive compensation including base salary, health/dental/vision coverage, 401(k) match, flexible PTO, and equity for eligible roles.
