Lead Software Engineer

SDE-3 - Platform

Backend Engineering Distributed Systems System Design

About Mstack

Mstack is building the world’s first AI-native chemical company.

We combine AI, scientific R&D, software and real-world manufacturing to dramatically shorten the time it takes to move from a chemical idea to commercial production. Our technology powers Chemstack AI, our chemistry intelligence platform, as well as a growing set of products across commerce, internal operations, automation, analytics and decision-making.

As Mstack grows, software is becoming the operating layer connecting our customers, scientists, commercial teams, supply chain and manufacturing ecosystem.

About the Platform Team

The Platform team builds the technology foundation that powers products across Mstack.

Some of our systems support Chemstack AI, including agentic workflows, enterprise applications and scientific tooling. But the Platform team works across a much broader problem space.

We are building systems for commerce, operational workflows, internal automation, metrics and decision-making, and shared capabilities that allow teams across Mstack to build products faster.

Our goal is not to create isolated applications. We want to build reusable engineering primitives, services and platforms that can support multiple products while remaining reliable, secure and easy to evolve.

The Role

• We are looking for an SDE-3 who is strong in backend engineering and enjoys solving difficult systems problems.
• You will design and build services that sit underneath critical products and workflows across Mstack. The problems you work on may involve distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, high-volume APIs, event-driven architectures, long-running jobs, data consistency, reliability and failure recovery.
• You will be expected to do more than implement a design handed to you. You should be able to take an ambiguous problem, understand the product and system constraints, design the architecture, reason through trade-offs, and take the system all the way to production.
• Systems design is core to this role. You should be comfortable thinking about what happens when traffic grows 10x, when dependencies fail, when a job runs for hours, when the same message is delivered twice, or when a system has to evolve without breaking existing users.

What You’ll Do

Design backend systems

• Design services, APIs, data models and system boundaries for new products and platform capabilities.
• Work through trade-offs around consistency, availability, latency, throughput, maintainability and cost.
• Move comfortably from a product requirement to a concrete architecture and execution plan.

Build distributed and asynchronous systems

• Design and operate systems involving queues, event streams, background jobs and workflow orchestration.
• Build systems where work may take seconds, minutes or hours and still needs to remain reliable across retries, crashes and deployments.
• Think carefully about idempotency, retries, ordering, concurrency, backpressure and failure recovery.

Own systems end to end

• Take ownership from design through implementation, testing, deployment and production operations.
• Be responsible not only for whether the code works, but whether the system behaves correctly in production.

Build APIs and platform services

• Design clean interfaces that allow other teams and products to build on top of your systems.
• Create reusable platform capabilities rather than repeatedly solving the same problem inside individual applications.

Work with complex data flows

• Build systems that move and transform data across multiple services and workflows.
• Reason about transaction boundaries, consistency models, caching, indexing, schema evolution and data lifecycle.

Engineer for reliability

• Design for failures before they happen.
• Build appropriate observability, metrics, logging and tracing so systems are understandable when something goes wrong.
• Participate in debugging production incidents and improve systems based on what we learn.

Make systems scalable

• Identify bottlenecks before they become production problems.
• Improve application, database and infrastructure performance as workloads grow.
• Know when horizontal scaling solves the problem and when the architecture itself needs to change.

Raise engineering standards

• Contribute to architecture reviews, code reviews and engineering discussions.
• Help improve how t…