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Salary: USD 221,250 - 348,500 / annual
Hex is seeking a Staff or Principal-level backend software engineer to join the Compute team, which owns the platform's most challenging performance problems. The team powers a technical product that enables users to analyze everything from small CSV files to petabyte-scale Snowflake tables with consistently fast performance.
In this backend-heavy role, you will drive architectural decisions for Hex's execution architecture—the graph-based system that compiles, plans, and runs user notebooks. You'll propose and build new compute components, develop parallel execution and caching strategies to reduce latency and minimize round trips to external data warehouses, and instrument complex systems to surface performance diagnostics.
Key responsibilities include evolving the execution architecture, driving performance optimization strategies, collaborating across engineering and product on new capabilities (such as building an internal query language that compiles to warehouse-specific dialects), authoring and reviewing technical proposals, mentoring engineers on ambitious designs, and roadmapping long-term designs with clear quarterly milestones.
You'll need 10+ years of backend engineering experience with strong focus on computation, performance, database/storage optimization, and systems architecture. You should have deep experience with parallel execution strategies, caching approaches, and the trade-offs in remote data warehouse computation. A track record of solving large-scale systems design problems involving significant data and operational complexity is essential. You must be proficient in Python and/or TypeScript, with experience in both preferred. Nice-to-haves include Kubernetes, Docker, cloud infrastructure knowledge, and some frontend experience.
The role is fully remote within the US Eastern timezone, with optional access to the NYC office. The tech stack includes TypeScript/React frontend, Express/Apollo GraphQL backend, Postgres, Redis, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and AWS.
