Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Platform)

AI analytics workspace where anyone can explore data with natural language, code, or no-code surfaces on trusted, governed context.

10 current maintainers9 active leads5 lead step-downsTeam intelligence

Maintainer signals as of 8/23/2026

San Francisco, CA
About Hex

Hex is an AI-native analytics workspace combining collaborative SQL/Python notebooks, interactive data apps, and AI agents (Notebook Agent, Context Studio) that answer data questions against governed semantic models. Founded in 2020 by Palantir alumni, Hex raised $70M (2025) and serves enterprise data teams including Reddit.

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Skills

Candidate Availability

Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.

About the Role

This backend-heavy role focuses on computation, performance, data systems design, and systems architecture for Hex's Compute team. The engineer will remain hands-on while driving architectural decisions, technical designs, and platform evolution.

Requirements

  • 10+ years of backend engineering experience.
  • Experience with computation, performance, database and storage optimization, and systems architecture.
  • Experience with parallel execution and caching strategies.
  • Experience solving large-scale systems design problems.
  • Python and/or TypeScript required.
  • Strong communication and technical leadership skills.

Responsibilities

  • Evolve the graph-based execution architecture for user notebooks.
  • Build compute components that support faster and smarter execution.
  • Drive parallel execution and caching strategies.
  • Instrument systems to diagnose performance problems.
  • Build platform capabilities such as an internal query language.
  • Author and review technical proposals.
  • Mentor engineers.
  • Propose and roadmap long-term designs.

Benefits

  • Equity
  • Comprehensive health benefits
  • Flexible paid time off