Platform Backend Engineer
San Francisco, CA Hybrid
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About the role
You may not have the five years of ML infrastructure experience the frontier labs are asking for yet. We’re not asking for it either. We want to see what you’ve already built, and we’re offering the environment, the data, and the problems to build the rest. Sight Machine runs AI systems on some of the most complex, high-dimensional, real-world data out there. Not synthetic benchmarks or chat logs. Live factory floors with millions of sensor events per minute, across dozens of interconnected machines, in facilities run by some of the world’s largest manufacturers. The algorithms that work here work because they have to, and that makes this a genuinely great place to build a technical foundation. As a Platform Backend Engineer, you’ll work on the core systems that ingest, model, and serve that data, building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers real-time AI insights at industrial scale. You’ll write code that runs in production, ships fast, and matters. We’ll ask to see what you’ve already built before we ask anything else. This is a role for someone early in their career who is already running ahead of it. If you’re building things on nights and weekends because you can’t help yourself, and you’ve been using AI tools as a core part of how you work rather than a novelty, we want to talk.
What you'll bring
- We’re not focused on years of experience.
- We’re focused on what you’ve shipped, how you work, and whether you’re the kind of person who raises the bar for everyone around them.
- You won’t tick every box here, and that’s fine.
- A portfolio you’re proud of.
- Side projects, open-source contributions, AI-powered tools you built because you wanted to see if you could.
- We’ll ask to see what you’ve made, and a strong portfolio can outweigh time on a resume.
- Real fluency with AI development tools.
- Not just Copilot for autocomplete, but agentic workflows, LLM-assisted pipelines, or tools you’ve built yourself on top of AI APIs.
- Show us how you actually work.
- 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, or less if your work speaks for itself.
- Python as your primary language, with solid working knowledge of at least one other high-level language.
- Strong foundations in data structures and algorithms, with some exposure to distributed systems and an interest in going deeper.