Senior Backend Engineer

About Masthead Data

Masthead Data is a data observability and BigQuery cost optimization platform built on a zero-data-access architecture — we operate exclusively on audit logs and metadata, and never touch our customers' underlying data. That constraint is our core differentiator and shapes every engineering decision we make. We work with enterprise customers who manage millions of tables and care deeply about security, auditability, and doing more with less. We uncover hidden data issues in real-time and drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly savings.

The Role

We're looking for a full-time remote Senior Backend Engineer to own significant parts of our platform end to end — from architecture through production. You'll work on systems that process large volumes of audit-log and metadata events, detect issues in production data environments, power our FinOps recommendations, and integrate deeply with GCP. This is a high-ownership role with real influence over technical direction.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate backend services in Kotlin (Spring Boot) running on GKE
• Work across our data pipeline: BigQuery, Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, and GCP-native tooling
• Build and refine the systems behind our cost optimization and observability features
• Manage infrastructure as code with Terraform, and help evolve our multi-tenant, per-customer project architecture
• Uphold and extend our zero-data-access security model — least-privilege access, granular controls
• Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews, and the technical growth of the team

What we're looking for

• Strong backend experience with Kotlin (or Java with a genuine willingness to move to Kotlin) and Spring Boot
• Hands-on experience running production workloads on Kubernetes, ideally GKE
• Ownership: you can take an ambiguous problem and drive it to a production result
• Solid grounding in GCP — BigQuery, Pub/Sub, IAM, and related services
• Comfort with infrastructure as code, particularly Terraform
• Experience with PostgreSQL and designing data-intensive backend systems
• A security-conscious mindset and appreciation for operating within tight data-access constraints

Nice to have

• Experience with data observability, FinOps, or cloud cost optimization
• Familiarity with multi-tenant SaaS architecture and cross-tenant isolation patterns
• Background working with enterprise customers and their security requirements

Why Masthead Data

You'll join a small, senior team solving genuinely hard problems where the architectural constraints are the interesting part. Your work will be visible to enterprise customers from day one, and you'll have room to shape both the product and how we build it.