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Carbon is a 3D printing company that enables creators to manufacture real-world parts at scale. The company operates at the intersection of hardware, software, and molecular science, serving commercial customers who rely on printers staying online, updated, and in constant communication with the cloud.
You will join as a Staff Backend Engineer owning the critical services that bridge Carbon's cloud platform and its global fleet of printers in the field. This is a high-impact technical leadership role where you will design and build backend systems for printer provisioning, updates, connectivity, and telemetry—systems that must be resilient and highly available as the fleet grows.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own core backend services managing printer identity, connectivity, provisioning, updates, and telemetry, ensuring resilience as the fleet scales.
- Design and improve the Linux layer underlying printer bring-up, installation, and in-field OS updates, applying deep Linux fundamentals to real production problems where physical access is impossible.
- Architect the protocols, connections, and failure modes that keep printers reliably connected to the cloud from anywhere globally, handling flaky networks, restrictive firewalls, and extended offline periods.
- Drive major backend initiatives end-to-end from design through production rollout, influencing architectural decisions and shaping the cloud-to-device platform's long-term direction.
- Participate in on-call rotations, lead incident response and postmortems, and help other teams operate dependent services.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship across backend, infrastructure, and device teams, raising the bar through design and code review.
Required qualifications:
- 8+ years building and operating production backend services with a track record of driving major initiatives end-to-end.
- Deep Linux fundamentals: processes, filesystems, networking, systemd, boot/init, package management, permissions, and production debugging.
- Strong networking skills: TCP/IP, TLS, DNS, HTTP, WebSockets, NAT/firewall traversal, and cloud-to-device connectivity reasoning.
- Hands-on experience with OS provisioning and lifecycle management including A/B update strategies.
- Expert proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Python, Go, Node/TypeScript, C++) with comfort in others.
- Production mindset: thinking about failure modes, blast radius, observability, and upgrade paths from the start; experience carrying a pager.
- Strong communication, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
Nice-to-have experience includes IoT/connected-device backends at scale, MQTT or pub/sub protocols in production, fleet management, remote diagnostics, OTA update systems, edge compute, embedded Linux, and polyglot build systems like Bazel.
