Senior Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure, Safety

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Northwind Robotics to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Northwind Robotics, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Northwind Robotics means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. At Northwind Robotics, we strive to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and the Safety organization’s mission is to become the leader in civil immersive online communities. We systematically detect, remove, and prevent problematic accounts, content and behavior, and we make Northwind Robotics accounts secure and free from compromise. We cover a broad area of the tech spectrum, including machine learning, classifiers for 3D models, experimentation, automation, detection workflows, and AI-powered text filters. Aligned and partnering with product teams, we use this tool-belt to discover new opportunities, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build safety products, and measure the impact on our community of users and developers. In doing so, we keep Northwind Robotics safe, civil, and inclusive, and we foster positive relationships between people around the world. WHY Safety Data Infrastructure To pro-actively find bad actors and protect good users, Northwind Robotics needs to ingest enormous amounts of data and make it usable both to our automated detection systems and for human moderators and customer support agents doing investigations. The Safety Data Infrastructure team is addressing these needs within Safety. We are building a high availability real time multi-model datastore consisting of screenshots, chats, voice communication and more. This will allow various safety systems to re-use all manner of data collected to spot bad actors and policy violations. As a member of the Account Infra Team, you will have a rare opportunity to sit at the convergence of ML infrastructure, data engineering, and high scalability engineering all while getting to learn Rust. You Will: Assume ownership of the complete lifecycle for full-stack features within Safety Data Infra ranging from technical specification, implementation, rollout, monitoring, and iteration, ensuring alignment with the designated pod roadmap. Engage in close collaboration with partner teams in Content Safety, Safety Experience, Accounts, ML Foundations and Northwind Robotics database platform teams. Define the architectural direction for scaling Safety Data Infra. Take complete responsibility for projects throughout their entire lifecycle. Drive cross-functional engagement and lead technical initiatives to ensure the widespread adoption and success of our core safety applications. Report directly to the Manager of Account Security and Infra. You Have: 4+ years of experience in software development. Distributed Systems Architecture: Proven ability to design and implement robust, high-throughput microservices (handling thousands of requests per second) while maintaining a strict focus on system safety and security. Backend Proficiency: Experience with non-relational datastores and large scale systems. Safety-Driven Mindset: A strong commitment to designing, implementing, and maintaining systems that prioritize user safety, data integrity, and compliance with safety policies. Equivalent experience or a BS in Computer Science, Applied Math, Physics, Engineering, Statistics, or another technical field. Curious to learn new technologies and systematically grow your skills. You Are: Experienced (4+ years): You have extensive experience as a full-stack engineer, proficient in back-end development, working on complex, production-grade systems end-to-end. Analytical & Data-Driven: You possess a strong ability to instrument, collect, and analyze user interaction data (e.g., A/B testing, usage metrics) to inform design decisions and continuously maximize user impact and product performance. Comfort working with agents. Northwind Robotics as a whole is also currently revamping our development flows to incorporate AI wherever possible. Versatile & Adaptable: We write and review code primarily in Rust with some adjacent systems in Go, C#, C++ and Python. Team-Player & Technical Leader: You are a collaborative team member who actively mentors peers, drives technical excellence, and takes ownership of leading and delivering key features and projects across team boundaries. AI native: You are eager to define and build AI-centric solutions, incorporating modern machine learning and agentic AI capabilities directly into the core user experience and system architecture. For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $196,750 — $243,290 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). Northwind Robotics provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Northwind Robotics also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.