Staff Backend Engineer, Platform Engineering - KDE Query

Kentik's Platform Engineering group is responsible for storing, enriching, and querying traffic metadata and metrics from the world's largest networks. Our platform actively monitors infrastructure, triggers automated responses to outages and attacks, and is critical to delivering complete network observability to our customers. Our platform ingests trillions of records and serves hundreds of thousands of queries for our users each day.  The scale that this group services is tremendous.  

Platform Engineering consists of 3 teams; (1) Ingest, (2) KDE Storage and Query, (3) Network Data. As a staff engineer in platform engineering on the KDE Query Team, you will have the opportunity to co-own, design, and scale a high-performance, data-intensive platform query layer that services the network monitoring data from the most influential companies on the internet.

We have built a team of world-class engineers, network experts, and technology thought leaders in a remote-friendly culture from day one. While prior experience in a remote environment is not required, we highly value strong collaboration and communication skills, and a high level of independence and autonomy.

• Act as a lead Individual Contributor to improve Query services, focusing on query speeds,  throughput, and latency
• Collaborate with other engineering, support, and sales teams to drive platform-wide query standards.
• Solve high-visibility, challenging engineering problems related to the data-intensive query engine.

What you'll bring

Studies have shown that some candidates tend to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. We encourage you to apply if you meet most of the criteria - even if you don’t match all of the qualifications, your skills and experience could be valuable in this role!

• 5+ years of experience in backend development using Go/C/Rust, with a strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and high-throughput data pipelines. 
• Deep experience with query planning, optimization, and execution in distributed environments, is a big plus.
• Proven track record of optimizing distributed systems to handle hundreds of millions of data points per second.
• A passion to grow personally and contribute to our team.
• Strong collaboration skills, essential for Kentik's remote-friendly culture.

Our tech stack

• Core Engine: Primarily written in Go.
• Application Layer: Node.js + Express for application serving and React as the primary UI framework.
• Tooling: JS and Python for tooling and scripting.
• Infrastructure & Messaging: Kafka for streaming pipelines, Redis for caching, and Postgres/MySQL for metadata.
• APIs & Routing: REST/JSON and gRPC endpoints via HAProxy and Envoy.
• Operations: GitHub for source control, Jenkins for CI/CD, and Jira for project tracking.

What we offer

Kentik is a fully remote company that operates globally. We seek professionals that will help us thrive as an organization, and in turn, to broaden and enhance your career. We’re very thorough in the interview pr