Senior Backend Engineer
Vienna, Virginia, United StatesAll locationsVienna, Virginia, United StatesThis position is in office in Vienna, VA. On-site
Salary not listedJobFig found this opening at its original source and checks that it remains available.
About the role
The Platform team is the engine room of Antithesis — we own the infrastructure, services, and tools that are at the core of the product. As a Senior Backend Engineer here, you won't be maintaining someone else's abstractions. You'll be designing them from scratch, owning them end-to-end, across the full stack: from raw binary formats and block compaction all the way up to the external APIs our customers depend on. Correctness and performance aren't nice-to-haves here — they're the job. If you get unreasonably excited about systems design, performance, storage efficiency, clean API contracts, and finding the bottleneck nobody else noticed, we'd love to talk. Our team has backgrounds spanning CS degrees, philosophy, mathematics, and everything in between — or nothing formal at all. What everyone shares is a high bar for engineering quality, regardless of title. We work in-person because it's how we build trust and tackle hard problems together.
What you'll bring
- 5+ years of software engineering experience.
- Rust is a strong preference, but exceptional systems engineers from other backgrounds are welcome.
- Experience building APIs, services, storage engines, query engines, or data-intensive backend systems.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems: consistency, fault tolerance, replication, observability.
- Hands-on experience designing and shipping APIs with attention to correctness and contract stability.
- Strong fundamentals — you care about correctness, test coverage, and well-designed abstractions.
- Bonus: query planning/optimization experience, multi-tenant platform or authz background, C/C++ familiarity, or open-source contributions.