Backend Senior Engineer

About Duckbill

We are developing a SaaS product called Skyway that simplifies financial planning and analysis of cloud billing data for large enterprises with complex cloud spending requirements. We're looking for a backend senior engineer to excel at product-led backend development while keeping one foot grounded in the front-end, the data, and the infra that powers everything.

We have fascinating technical challenges around data modeling and continuous quality control, but we’re also at the critical point every startup faces where we need to be able to test our product visions quickly with key design partners. We're exploring a unique market niche of enterprise-scale clients who need capabilities far beyond the offerings of standard FinOps tools; where the difference our product makes for our customers will save them millions.

What You'll Do

• Design, extend, and operate backend services that power our data-heavy product experiences

• Build and maintain APIs and backend workflows that are easy for frontend engineers and data engineers to integrate with

• Work with confidence against our OLAP and OLTP data stores (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, S3) to deliver low-latency, reliable APIs

• Own critical pieces of our billing and financial data modeling, including performance, correctness, and observability

• Collaborate with data engineers on ETL and validation patterns that keep downstream experiences fast and trustworthy

• Help shape and improve our approach to testing, CI/CD, and operational excellence for backend services

• Collaborate with the entire engineering team to investigate and resolve data quality and performance issues across the stack

• Debate the merits of LLMs in software development while constantly improving yourself and mentoring your teammates

Our Tech Stack

• React + TypeScript

• Python + Flask

• PostgreSQL

• ClickHouse

• Airflow

• AWS

About You

• 5+ years experience of true full-stack or backend engineering, with a strong emphasis on backend systems and APIs

• 3+ years working explicitly with Python in production services; you are comfortable designing, implementing, and operating backend code

• Experience designing and consuming RESTful or JSON-based APIs, including authentication, pagination, and error handling

• Strong SQL and data modeling skills, comfortable working with both transactional and analytical workloads

• Experience working with data and data-heavy product experiences where correctness and performance matter

• Comfortable collaborating with Product, Design, and frontend engineers every day

• Ability to deliver results in hours instead of days

• Some familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure preferred

• Some experience in a startup environment, or desire+ability to work well in one

• Fastidiousness about data quality, correctness, and reliability in production systems

Nice-to-have

• Experience with ClickHouse or other OLAP datastores

• Experience with Airflow or other data processing orchestration systems

• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or background job queues

• AWS experience (networking, IAM, serverless, containers, or data services)

Why This Role is Exciting

Your work will underpin the showpiece of the Skyway product; Duckbill’s flagship SaaS offering for the largest companies using the public cloud. You’ll build and operate backend systems that make complex financial and billing data accessible, reliable, and fast for our customers. You'll have meaningful ownership over our backend architecture and the way we build services that directly impact customer success, working in a small team where your contributions immediately matter.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation for this role is a salary range of $180,000 to $200,000 plus early stage equity options. We provide a 401(k) and healthcare, vision, and dental with premiums fully covered by the company. Dependents are covered 50%. We offer 4 weeks of PTO, plus unlimited sick leave.

About Us

We are a small and growing team (less than 10 people!), which means you get the opportunity to be on the ground floor of building the product and company. Our founders are the founders of The Duckbill Group, who bring their wealth of domain expertise and deep industry and customer connections in cloud cost management to the product. We're in the process of coming out of stealth mode while we're focusing on building the first major features of the product.

This is an in-office role

We work together in the office in San Francisco three days per week, so you must be located in the SF Bay Area and willing to work in the office on a regular basis.