Senior Backend Engineer

Company: Judgment Labs
Location: San Francisco CA (Chinatown office)
Compensation: $300000 - $450000 competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B

Judgment Labs builds infrastructure for Agent Behavior Monitoring (ABM). Where traditional observability logs exceptions and latency Judgment surfaces behavioral anomalies such as instruction drift and context-retrieval loss in production AI agents at scale and hundreds of agent-building teams rely on it.

The company has raised $30M across its seed and Series A led by Lightspeed with SV Angel Valor Equity Partners Nova Global and angels including Chris Manning Michael Ovitz and Kevin Hartz.

This is a critical early senior hire to mature Judgments software systems and engineering practices as the company scales. You will be a hands-on technical leader writing code daily while shaping architecture code quality and deployment standards working deeply in backend systems and OLAP infrastructure (ClickHouse) mentoring a growing team and partnering with the founders on scalability and reliability.

• Lead backend development hands-on while guiding architecture and design decisions.
• Improve code quality reduce technical debt and implement scalable practices as volume grows.
• Build and optimize backend systems on columnar/OLAP databases such as ClickHouse.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering maturity.
• Partner with the founders on reliability scalability and deployment decisions.

• 5-8 years of backend or full-stack engineering at top VC-backed or FAANG companies
• Deep experience with backend systems and columnar/OLAP databases especially ClickHouse
• A track record of improving code quality and managing technical debt at a growing company
• Hands-on technical leadership: you write code daily while guiding system design
• Experience mentoring engineers

• Early senior hire at a high-growth startup
• Cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines at scale
• Data infrastructure or observability background

Full benefits package and Equinox membership.

Founder conversation (30 min with an optional technical deep dive) two technical rounds then a work trial.

REVENUE: 15.1% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $45K-$68K; 2 seat(s) up to $113K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): Datadog Arize AI LangChain Weights & Biases Honeycomb Databricks Snowflake.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 5-8 yrs; backend at top startup/FAANG; ClickHouse/OLAP; hands-on tech lead; visa: H-1B sponsorship available; location: SF in person.