Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Platform)

NYC or Remote (US)

We are looking for a Staff or Principal-level software engineer to join our Compute team.

Hex's Compute team owns one of the hardest performance problems in the product: our users do everything from analyzing 100-line CSV files to querying petabyte-scale Snowflake tables, and in all cases they expect it to feel fast. We power a technical product that our customers trust to accurately retrieve data from their own systems to then efficiently execute polyglot backed analytics workflows.

This is a backend-heavy role with a focus on computation, performance, data systems design, and systems architecture. You'll drive architectural decisions that compound over years, write the technical designs that shape how the team builds, and directly influence the long-term trajectory of Hex's compute platform — all while staying deeply hands-on in the codebase.

What you will do

Evolve Hex's execution architecture — the graph-based system that compiles, plans, and runs user notebooks — including proposing and building entirely new compute components that support faster, smarter execution

Drive parallel execution strategies and caching approaches that reduce latency and minimize unnecessary round trips to external data warehouses

Instrument complex systems to surface and diagnose performance problems to give the team and our customers a much clearer picture of where time is being spent

Collaborate across engineering and product to support new platform capabilities, such as building an internal query language that compiles to the appropriate dialect for any connected warehouse

Author and review technical proposals, and mentor engineers to implement ambitious designs effectively

Propose and roadmap long-term designs with clear milestones across quarters

About You

10+ years of backend engineering experience, with a strong focus on computation, performance, database/storage optimization, and syst...