Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

Normal Computing is building software that powers semiconductor engineers, including a local CLI, a web project‑management product, and backend services that coordinate long‑running work. As a Backend Software Engineer you will help make these pieces feel like one dependable product, focusing on production‑grade code, reliable state handling, and clear APIs.

Key responsibilities

• Design stable, well‑typed interfaces that connect the CLI, web UI, and backend services.
• Evolve Postgres schemas, migrations, and event histories without breaking existing sessions.
• Implement lifecycle, queueing, retry, cancellation, idempotency, and recovery logic for long‑running jobs.
• Improve software that runs on developer machines and in containerized environments.
• Enhance observability through metrics, traces, structured logs, health checks, and operator tooling.
• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks in APIs, database access, and event processing.
• Coordinate product changes across multiple repositories, languages, and service boundaries.

Required profile

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of shipping backend systems used by others.
• Experience designing APIs and data models, and reasoning about concurrency and state.
• Hands‑on experience operating production services where reliability, observability, maintainability, and performance are critical.
• Ability to debug across client, CLI, services, databases, and deployment infrastructure.
• Pragmatic judgment about when to invest in durable abstractions versus shipping quickly.

Required skills

• PostgreSQL (schemas, migrations, event histories)
• API design and implementation
• Distributed systems concepts (retries, idempotency, cancellation, recovery)
• Containerization and deployment pipelines
• Observability tools (metrics, tracing, structured logging)