Senior Backend Engineer, Code Metal

• Strong professional experience as a backend software engineer working on production systems
• Deep experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL or similar systems
• Strong ability to design:
• Normalized schemas
• Associative/relationship tables
• Constraints and validation logic
• Enum / lookup models
• Lifecycle-aware data structures
• Strong SQL skills, including:
• Complex joins
• Aggregation
• CTEs
• Views or materialized views where appropriate
• Query performance awareness
• Experience defining or working with data contracts between services, APIs, and persistence layers
• Experience building or maintaining data ingestion, transformation, or normalization workflows
• Ability to reason carefully about business rules, edge cases, and how domain logic should be represented in software
• Strong programming ability in Python
• Experience working with ORMs and migration frameworks such as:
• SQLAlchemy
• Alembic
• Or comparable tools
• Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating with engineers, product stakeholders, and domain experts

Desirable

• We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer, Data Systems to help design and build the core data foundations of our platform
• This role is for an engineer who is deeply comfortable translating complex real-world concepts into clean relational data models, durable SQL schemas, clear data contracts, and maintainable backend services
• You will work at the intersection of backend engineering, data architecture, and domain modeling
• A major focus of this position will be building systems where business rules and operational logic can be expressed through data structures and database-backed rules, rather than being hardcoded exclusively in application logic
• You will help shape how we represent entities, relationships, constraints, validation rules, ingested data, and derived logic across the product
• This is not a traditional analytics or BI data engineering role
• It is a product/backend engineering role with a strong data systems focus
• Design and evolve relational data models that represent complex domain concepts, entities, relationships, and workflows
• Build and maintain SQL schemas, constraints, indexes, migrations, and query patterns that support scalable backend systems
• Define and enforce data contracts between services, APIs, ingestion pipelines, and downstream consumers
• Develop ingestion and normalization workflows for structured, semi-structured, and external source data
• Move business logic from ad hoc application code into well-modeled, extensible data structures, including:
• Configurable rules
• Eligibility or feasibility checks
• Mappings and lookup tables
• Domain-specific constraints
• Decision logic represented in data
• Partner with product, domain experts, and engineers to convert ambiguous or evolving requirements into clear data abstractions
• Build backend services and APIs that expose, validate, and operate on these data models
• Improve the consistency, traceability, and maintainability of data across the system
• Help establish patterns for:
• Versioned data models
• Schema governance
• Data validation
• Audit-ability
• Backward-compatible contracts
• Participate in architecture discussions and code reviews, especially where data modeling decisions have long-term consequences