About the job Judgment Labs — Senior Backend Engineer
Judgment Labs — Senior Backend Engineer
Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA (Chinatown) Compensation: $300,000–$450,000 + competitive equity Hiring count: 2 Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B Reports to: Founding team
About Judgment Labs
Judgment Labs builds infrastructure for Agent Behavior Monitoring (ABM). Where traditional observability logs exceptions and latency, ABM surfaces behavioral anomalies — instruction drift, context retrieval loss — in scaled production environments. Hundreds of teams building autonomous agents rely on Judgment to understand how their systems behave post-deployment, clustering patterns across conversations and workflows, correlating regressions to specific interaction types, and pinpointing where reliability breaks down.
Total funding: $30M+ across two rounds in the past five months Investors: Lightspeed, SV Angel, Valor Equity Partners, Nova Global, Chris Manning, Michael Ovitz, Michael Abbott, Cory Levy, Kevin Hartz, and others Stage: Series A Website: judgmentlabs.ai Office: San Francisco (Chinatown)
Why Candidates Should Join
- Early senior seat: Critical early senior hire shaping architecture, code quality, and engineering practices as the company scales.
- Real ownership: Hands-on technical leadership — writing code daily while owning system design and deployment standards, in direct partnership with the founding team.
- Frontier problem, strong backing: $30M+ raised in five months from top-tier investors, building reliability infrastructure for the fast-growing AI agent space.
- Perks: Full benefits package, Equinox membership, competitive compensation and equity.
The Role
An early senior backend hire to mature Judgment's software systems and engineering practices as it scales. A hands-on technical leader working deeply in backend systems and OLAP infrastructure (ClickHouse), mentoring a growing engineering team, and partnering directly with founders on scalability and reliability.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead backend development hands-on while guiding system architecture and design decisions across the team.
- Improve code quality, reduce technical debt, and implement scalable software practices as volume grows.
- Build and optimize backend systems against columnar/OLAP databases like ClickHouse to power ABM at production scale.
- Mentor junior engineers and establish a culture of technical excellence and engineering maturity.
- Partner with founders on key decisions around system reliability, scalability, and deployment processes.
Tech stack: Backend systems + columnar/OLAP databases (ClickHouse); cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines at scale.
Requirements
- 5–8 years backend at VC-backed or FAANG company
- Production experience with ClickHouse or similar OLAP DBs
- Hands-on system design and architecture ownership
- Mentored junior engineers previously
- SF in-person, 5 days, Chinatown
Green Flags
- Owned backend architecture decisions at scale
- Built analytical or observability infrastructure previously
- Worked with high-volume time-series or event data
- Strong mentorship track record with junior engineers
- Comfort in Chinatown SF, 5-day in-office culture
Red Flags
- 8+ yrs but no recent hands-on coding
- Only worked in monolithic CRUD systems
- Never owned a system end-to-end in production
- Needs structured roadmap to execute
- Management-track, no hands-on coding recently
- Remote or hybrid-only preference
Role Details
- Salary — $300,000–$450,000
- Equity — Competitive (unspecified %)
- On-site policy — On-site, San Francisco (Chinatown); 5 days per Requirements (screening form asks Mon–Sat — confirm actual cadence with Contrario)
- Visa sponsorship — H-1B available
- Employment type — Full-time
- Location — San Francisco, CA (Chinatown)
Screening Questions
- Where are you currently located?
- LinkedIn URL
- Are you legally authorized to work in the United States?
- Will you require work sponsorship now and/or in the future?
- Are you located in the San Francisco-area and/or willing to relocate?
- Are you willing to work on-site in our San Francisco office Monday–Saturday?
Interview Process
Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidate awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Founder vibe check (30 min) — Plus an optional 15-min deeper dive into technical projects. Stage 3 — System Design — System design interview. Stage 4 — API Design — API design interview. Stage 5 — Work Trial — Hands-on work trial. Stage 6 — Offer Extended Stage 7 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.