Senior Backend Engineer
Human Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm that partners with exceptional founders, deploying capital and building high-caliber teams at scale across the world's most critical industries.
About Human Capital
Human Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm that builds and invests in companies defining the world's most critical industries. The firm partners with founders to assemble exceptional teams, offering talent, investment, legal, compliance, and operational support alongside capital. Its portfolio and clients include notable companies such as Livongo, Snowflake, SpaceX, Anduril, Dandy, The Boring Company, Brex, Neuralink, Cloaked, XAI, Commure, ModRetro, Kalshi, Applied Intuition, Speechify, Transcarent, and Qualia.
Skills
About the Role
You will design, build, and operate high-scale, low-latency backend services that score and protect web and API traffic against automated abuse, working at the core of HUMAN's real-time detection platform. You'll own services end-to-end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and reliability, including full-stack instrumentation for monitoring, alerting, and tracing. You'll implement and evolve real-time detection and decisioning flows within the Sightline Cyberfraud Defense platform, collaborating with security researchers, data science, and product teams. You'll build and operate services in a Kubernetes environment using a modern GitOps stack, ensuring robust rollout strategies and safe migrations. You'll leverage AI assistants and agents to accelerate your development lifecycle, partner with adjacent teams on end-to-end flows, and contribute to technical design and code reviews.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience building backend services with a strong grasp of modern distributed systems design
- High proficiency in at least one backend language such as Go, Java, or Scala, including concurrency and multithreading concepts
- Proven experience building and operating production systems in a major cloud provider (GCP or similar), including containerized workloads and CI/CD pipelines
- Hands-on experience with datastores and messaging systems (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, or Postgres)
- Solid understanding of networking fundamentals, HTTP-based services, and best practices for secure, reliable APIs
- Practical experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Opsgenie) and resolving complex, distributed production issues
- Comfortable working both independently on complex technical problems and as part of a collaborative team
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain distributed, high-throughput backend services processing hundreds of thousands of requests per second with strict tens-of-milliseconds latency targets
- Own services from architecture and implementation to deployment and reliability
- Implement full-stack instrumentation including monitoring, alerting, and tracing to detect and mitigate production issues
- Implement and evolve real-time detection and decisioning flows within the Sightline Cyberfraud Defense platform
- Build and operate services in a Kubernetes environment using a modern GitOps stack
- Ensure robust rollout strategies and safe migrations
- Leverage AI assistants and agents to accelerate architectural scaffolding, automated tasks, and debugging/testing
- Partner with adjacent teams to design end-to-end flows balancing security, performance, and customer experience
- Contribute to technical design reviews and code reviews
Benefits
- Well-being and learning stipends
- Flexible work options
- Dedicated time off