Staff Backend Engineer — Platform Core

Archer • San Jose, CA

11h • Hybrid

About The Position

Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise.
Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members.
Staff Backend Engineer - Platform Core (Hybrid-San Jose)
Role Overview
This role is responsible for building the connector framework and ingestion services that power a foundational data and services platform that unifies enterprise systems into a canonical model. This is not a low-code integration role. You will write production Go services that handle data reconciliation at scale. Our architecture follows a specific pattern: we fetch and store raw API responses for debugging and replay, then transform them into canonical entities. You are responsible for the "system of record" for how our platform interacts with external source systems.

Requirements

• 6+ years in backend engineering: Experience building and operating distributed systems in production.
• Go (or similar): Proficiency with strong typing and concurrency.
• PostgreSQL Expertise: Strong understanding of schema design, indexing strategies, and performance tuning
• Distributed systems: Experience designing and operating distributed systems
• Data Integrity: Experience implementing idempotent systems, dead-letter queues, and backpressure management.
• Delta syncs: Experience designing incremental and delta synchronization mechanisms with watermark tracking and safe recovery from mid-sync failures
• Cloud Native: Experience deploying and managing services in AWS or similar environments.

Nice To Haves

• Enterprise Integration: Experience building custom integration frameworks or working with complex ERP/HR APIs (SAP, Workday, etc.).
• Systems Architecture: Understanding of when to utilize polling versus event-driven patterns (CDC/Kafka).
• AI-Ready Data: Experience structuring data to be consumed by downstream AI/LLM services.

Responsibilities

• Framework Engineering: Build the reusable plumbing for connectors—including authentication, circuit breaking, retries, and idempotency—so that adding a new data source focuses exclusively on data logic.
• Canonical Mapping: Design the logic to map inconsistent enterprise data (Finance, HR, etc.) into strongly-typed entities. This includes handling multi-source enrichment, unit normalization, and field-level provenance.
• Reliability: Implement synchronization strategies with watermark management to ensure the system recovers gracefully from failures without data loss or duplication.
• Replayability: Build infrastructure to store raw API responses allowing the system to re-process data from local storage when mapping logic evolves, without re-querying source APIs.
• Performance: Optimize for high-volume synchronization, focusing on PostgreSQL performance, concurrent fetching, and batch upserts.
• Observability: Define and monitor metrics for throughput, data drift, and error rates to identify issues before they impact downstream applications.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with platform architect on schema evolution, entity contracts, and the boundary between what connectors own and what the platform layer handles

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed