Lead Software Engineer - Backend
Faros Ai
Redwood City, CA · $210k–$250k a year · Posted October 2, 2026
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Where Redwood City, CA ranks
Where Redwood City, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #2Best cities for director and executive jobs in the West Coast32% · of 71
- #3Cities with the most hybrid jobs28% · of 100
- #3Cities with the most hybrid jobs in the West Coast28% · of 66
- #8Best all-round cities for remote workers in the West Coast68 / 100 · of 39
- #9Cities that post pay most often44% · of 100
- #10Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast17% · of 54
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
MISSION
At Faros AI, we are reshaping the way engineering organizations operate, with an engineering intelligence platform that provides visibility and context across the organization's software delivery systems. This deep operational context supports engineering leaders today, and is increasingly essential as AI agents begin to operate within real software delivery environments. Faros AI is laying the foundation for how humans and AI will build software together in the years ahead.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We’re looking for software engineers who want to build the future of engineering operations with us. This is a hands-on role. While you will drive architectural vision and mentor senior engineers, you will spend a significant portion of your time writing code, building core systems, and solving our most complex technical challenges.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Architect, build, and scale our highly scalable data infrastructure and core engineering platforms, owning the hardest technical problems from whiteboard design all the way through to production deployment.
- Lead from the front by writing high-quality, resilient code, establishing architectural standards, and building best practices for backend services/APIs to ensure system-wide reliability, security, and scalability.
- Act as a technical partner to product and engineering leadership, translating business strategy into technical roadmaps and mentoring other engineers.
BASELINE REQUIREMENTS
EXPERIENCE
- 5–8+ years with ownership of critical components or services
TECHNICAL STACK
- Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript + Node.js and/or Python
- Experience designing/consuming/implementing REST/GraphQL APIs
- Experience with building & productionizing web services, data pipelines, ETL/ELT, orchestration frameworks
- Strong database fundamentals (SQL/NoSQL)
- CI/CD familiarity (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, etc.)
- Experience running production workloads including monitoring, alerting, logging, metrics, traces, oncall
- Security fundamentals
CLOUD
- Hands-on experience with one of more major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, GCP (certifications are a plus)
COLLABORATION & COMMUNICATION
- Comfortable working with distributed international teams
- Strong ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
ENGLISH
- English C1: able to participate in technical calls and write clear communication.
EDUCATION
- Degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering, or equivalent real-world experience.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with building & integrating with SaaS platforms
- Experience with engineering analytics or developer-productivity tooling
- Experience with IaC, containers, serverless, queues/event-driven architectures
- Experience with security practices (authN/authZ, secrets management)
- Familiarity with engineering metrics (DORA, code quality, delivery metrics)
- Hands-on experience using coding agents (AI-assisted development)