Backend Software Engineer

Who you are

• 6+ years' experience in professional backend software development, with significant time operating and scaling production systems that customers rely on
• A track record of taking systems from "working" to "reliable": improving uptime, reducing incidents, and handling growth in data volume, traffic, or customers
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, VPC networking) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation)
• Strong knowledge of OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including identity providers (e.g., Cognito, Okta, Auth0, Keycloak), JWT handling, and secure session and token management
• Experience designing and operating both REST APIs and streaming or real-time data endpoints
• Experience working in environments governed by NIST or ISO/IEC 27001 security standards, with an understanding of how they shape engineering decisions
• Proficiency in Python or another backend language such as Go, Java, or TypeScript/Node.js
• Excellent documentation, collaboration, and communication skills, and comfort making and defending architectural trade-offs
• Experience with the Pangeo ecosystem (xarray, Dask, Zarr, Jupyter) or other large-scale scientific and geospatial data tooling
• Background in the weather or aviation domains, including familiarity with data formats such as GRIB2 and NetCDF, aviation products such as METAR/TAF or ADS-B, or regulatory contexts such as the FAA

What the job involves

• We're seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer who has helped production systems scale, harden, and stay reliable as usage and expectations grew. You'll own critical services end to end, contribute to the architecture behind our weather and aviation data services, and help raise the engineering bar as we grow
• This role suits someone with experience in an established organization with production customers, uptime commitments, and compliance obligations, where a well-designed, observable, recoverable system matters more than the fastest prototype
• Build and improve AWS-based backend services with a focus on availability, fault tolerance, and performance as load grows
• Design and implement authentication and authorization features using OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including token handling, service-to-service auth, and access control
• Develop and maintain the REST APIs and streaming endpoints (e.g., WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, or Kinesis/Kafka-backed feeds) that deliver Spire's weather and aviation data to customers
• Improve observability across metrics, logging, and tracing, and help define and track SLOs for the services you own
• Share ownership of production operations, including participation in an on-call rotation, incident response, and postmortems, as part of an engineering team that runs what it builds
• Apply secure engineering practices day to day, and help our systems meet the NIST and ISO/IEC 27001 standards we operate under
• Take the technical lead on projects within your area, from design through rollout
• Mentor other engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions
• Contribute to team practices for testing, deployment, infrastructure-as-code, and change management
• Collaborate closely with product owners and data scientists to align backend services with customer and mission needs
• Create and maintain clear documentation for APIs and system architectures

Benefits

• Name your own satellite: Be remembered throughout time by choosing a name for a LEMUR satellite.
• Family Leave: Family is important. Our parental and family leave is designed to let you make the most of those precious moments.
• Learning & development: Spire more than encourages and supports ongoing personal improvement and a growth mindset, we welcome it!
• Launch Attendance: One of the perks from launching satellites into space is that Spire often has VIP access to view the launch.
• Generous time off policy: Take the time you need. Our flexible time-off policy promotes a positive work-life balance.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Our EAP makes sure you have access to support and counseling sessions whenever you need it.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP): Our ESPP provides eligible employees with an opportunity to purchase Spire shares through accumulated contributions.
• Fitness Reimbursement: Spire encourages fitness activity to promote employee well-being with reimbursed gym membership expenses.
• Employee Referral Program: Spire is always looking for outstanding people to join our team, and you can help and be awarded a referral bonus.
• Healthy snacks & beverages: To help our employees to be as productive as possible, we provide healthy snacks and beverages in each of our offices.