Software Engineer, Backend (Platform)

NYC or Remote (US)

About the role

We are looking for a Senior or Staff-level software engineer to join our Backend Platform team.

Our team is responsible for building and maintaining Hex's core compute platform, which serves as the fundamental engine for all code execution, SQL querying, and data processing across the Hex application. Our platform powers everything from the core notebook interface and published applications to the complex data capabilities required by our AI agents.

Our mission is twofold

to make the compute platform exceptionally easy to use, develop on, and monitor, while also ensuring it is blazingly fast and performant. Engineers on this team operate at the challenging and rewarding intersection of systems architecture, API design, and deep performance optimization.

What you will do

On the Backend Platform team you’ll work on projects with high technical complexity and spanning across the stack, from our backend data systems to the frontend of Hex’s collaborative notebook interface.

Here are some examples of the kinds of projects you might tackle

Using DuckDB to enable seamless data interoperability between Python and SQL code written by our users or AI agents

Building intelligent caching systems to speed up customer data queries

Implementing a graph-based dependency framework for optimizing multi-step execution plans

Instrumenting complex, multi-language systems to identify performance bottlenecks

Building visualizations into the product to help users understand the performance characteristics of their code

About you

6+ years of engineering experience working on complex, data-driven systems or applications

Expert-level understanding of Python, SQL, jupyter kernels, and/or data warehousing systems

Deeply informed on industry trends around data processing, databases, and performant data architectures

You love diving into highly complex codebases and have a...