Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

Company: Judgment Labs
Location: San Francisco, CA (Chinatown office)
Compensation: $300,000 - $450,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B

About Judgment Labs

Judgment Labs builds infrastructure for Agent Behavior Monitoring (ABM). Where traditional observability logs exceptions and latency, Judgment surfaces behavioral anomalies such as instruction drift and context-retrieval loss in production AI agents at scale, and hundreds of agent-building teams rely on it.

The company has raised $30M+ across its seed and Series A, led by Lightspeed with SV Angel, Valor Equity Partners, Nova Global and angels including Chris Manning, Michael Ovitz and Kevin Hartz.

The Role

This is a critical early senior hire to mature Judgment's software systems and engineering practices as the company scales. You will be a hands-on technical leader, writing code daily while shaping architecture, code quality and deployment standards, working deeply in backend systems and OLAP infrastructure (ClickHouse), mentoring a growing team, and partnering with the founders on scalability and reliability.

What You Will Do

• Lead backend development hands-on while guiding architecture and design decisions.
• Improve code quality, reduce technical debt and implement scalable practices as volume grows.
• Build and optimize backend systems on columnar/OLAP databases such as ClickHouse.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering maturity.
• Partner with the founders on reliability, scalability and deployment decisions.

What You Bring

• 5-8 years of backend or full-stack engineering at top VC-backed or FAANG companies
• Deep experience with backend systems and columnar/OLAP databases, especially ClickHouse
• A track record of improving code quality and managing technical debt at a growing company
• Hands-on technical leadership: you write code daily while guiding system design
• Experience mentoring engineers

Nice to Have

• Early senior hire at a high-growth startup
• Cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines at scale
• Data infrastructure or observability background

Benefits

Full benefits package and Equinox membership.

Interview Process

Founder conversation (30 min, with an optional technical deep dive), two technical rounds, then a work trial.

REVENUE: 15.1% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $45K-$68K; 2 seat(s) = up to $113K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): Datadog, Arize AI, LangChain, Weights & Biases, Honeycomb, Databricks, Snowflake.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 5-8 yrs; backend at top startup/FAANG; ClickHouse/OLAP; hands-on tech lead; visa: H-1B sponsorship available; location: SF in person.