Software Engineer - Backend

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Company Background

Specter is creating a software-defined “control plane” for the physical world. We are starting with protecting American businesses by granting them ubiquitous perception over their physical assets.

To do so, we are creating a connected hardware-software ecosystem on top of multi-modal wireless mesh sensing technology. This allows us to drive down the cost and time of deploying sensors by 10x. Our platform will ultimately become the perception engine for a company’s physical footprint, enabling real-time perimeter visibility and autonomous operations management.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast-approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast-growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

Role + Responsibilities

Specter is hiring an infrastructure software engineer to design, deploy, and scale distributed systems that power our mother node base stations and cloud services. This role owns the reliability, scalability, and performance of Specter’s sensing and perception platform across edge devices and cloud infrastructure.

Key responsibilities include:

• Architecting and operating distributed, Linux-based systems across edge and cloud environments.

• Designing scalable pipelines for streaming, storing, and processing vast amounts of video and sensor data.

• Building containerized services (Docker/Kubernetes) to deploy perception and inference workloads at scale.

• Developing observability systems for monitoring, logging, and alerting across a fleet of edge nodes and cloud infrastructure.

• Optimizing queue-based video ingestion, transcoding, and upload pipelines for reliability under bandwidth-constrained environments.

• Implementing highly-available infrastructure for real-time alerting, APIs, and customer-facing event systems.

• Working cross-functionally with hardware, perception, and application teams to ensure infrastructure supports rapid iteration and scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with databases, storage, and caching technologies (PostgreSQL, Redis, object stores like S3, and distributed file systems).

• Expertise building and maintaining real-time streaming and event systems (WebRTC, Websockets, Kafka, or similar).

• Strong experience designing and securing cloud infrastructure using AWS (preferred), GCP, or Azure.

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Strong knowledge of distributed systems principles — replication, consensus, partition tolerance, fault recovery.

• Familiarity with video pipelines, transcoding, and formats is a plus.

• Prior experience scaling edge-to-cloud systems or operating at the infra layer of robotics and IoT a bonus.