Backend Engineer, Data Systems (Modeling & Simulation)

About this role

ABOUT CODE METAL

Code Metal is redefining code translation for mission-critical industries, helping defense partners move more quickly and reliably from algorithm to silicon. Our platform accelerates deployment of DSP, RF, communications, and embedded signal processing algorithms onto heterogeneous compute targets, including GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and edge SoCs. We also support automotive, aerospace, and semiconductor partners deploying complex algorithms onto constrained hardware with speed and rigor.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our Modeling & Simulation team is building the next-generation wargaming and decision-support platform that helps the DoW make multi-billion-dollar force-design decisions before those decisions are made in the real world. The team spans simulation and physics, backend and data systems, frontend and geospatial visualization, and AI systems, working together to turn operational questions into extensible, mission- and campaign-level simulations that government users can trust.

In this role, you will help design and build the core data foundations of our platform. This role is for an engineer who is deeply comfortable translating complex real-world concepts into clean relational data models, durable SQL schemas, clear data contracts, and maintainable backend services. You will work at the intersection of backend engineering, data architecture, and domain modeling. Scope of ownership, architectural authority, and mentorship responsibility scale with level — see “Level Expectations by Track” below.

A major focus of this position is building systems where business rules and operational logic that can be expressed through data structures and database-backed rules, rather than being hardcoded exclusively in application logic. You will help shape how we represent entities, relationships, constraints, validation rules, ingested data, and derived logic across the product. This is not a traditional analytics or BI data engineering role — it is a product/backend engineering role with a strong data systems focus.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Design and evolve relational data models that represent complex domain concepts, entities, relationships, and workflows.

- Build and maintain SQL schemas, constraints, indexes, migrations, and query patterns that support scalable backend systems.

- Define and enforce data contracts between services, APIs, ingestion pipelines, and downstream consumers.

- Develop ingestion and normalization workflows for structured, semi-structured, and external source data.

- Move business logic from ad hoc application code into well-modeled, extensible data structures, including configurable rules, eligibility/feasibility checks, mappings and lookup tables, domain-specific constraints, and decision logic represented in data.

- Partner with product, domain experts, and engineers to convert ambiguous or evolving requirements into clear data abstractions.

- Build backend services and APIs that expose, validate, and operate on these data models.

- Improve the consistency, traceability, and maintainability of data across the system.

- Help establish patterns for versioned data models, schema governance, data validation, audit-ability, and backward-compatible contracts.

- Participate in architecture discussions and code reviews, especially where data modeling decisions have long-term consequences.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

- Strong professional experience as a backend software engineer working on production systems.

- Deep experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL or similar systems.

- Strong ability to design normalized schemas, associative/relationship tables, constraints and validation logic, enum/lookup models, and lifecycle-aware data structures.

- Strong SQL skills, including complex joins, aggregation, CTEs, views or materialized views where appropriate, and query performance awareness.

- Experience defining or working with data contracts between services, APIs, and persistence layers.

- Experience building or maintaining data ingestion, transformation, or normalization workflows.

- Ability to reason carefully about business rules, edge cases, and how domain logic should be represented in software.

- Strong programming ability in Python.

- Experience working with ORMs and migration frameworks such as SQLAlchemy, Alembic, or comparable tools.

- Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating with engineers, product stakeholders, and domain experts.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience designing rule-driven systems, policy engines, feasibility checks, or configuration-driven business logic.

- Experience deciding when logic belongs in application code, SQL/database structures, rules tables, or services/domain layers.

- Experience modeling complex operational domains such as simulations, logistics, planning systems, geospatial systems, defense, aerospace, or other highly structured data environments.

- Experience with PostGIS or geospatial data, event-driven systems, versioned datasets or snapshots, data lineage/provenance, or imported external datasets with inconsistent or incomplete source quality.

- Familiarity with API schema design and typed contracts, such as Pydantic, JSON Schema, protobuf, or OpenAPI.

LEVEL EXPECTATIONS BY TRACK

This role is open at Senior, Staff, or Principal level. The expectations below (from the CodeMetal Engineering – Functional Competencies framework) describe how scope, ownership, and technical leadership differ by level; candidates are evaluated against the level they are hired into.

SENIOR (P3 · ESTABLISHED)

- Years of Experience: 5+

- Engineering Craft & Code Quality: Writes clean, idiomatic, well-tested code and follows best practices; drives debugging of the team's hardest issues; ensures AI-assisted work is correct, modular, and fully tested.

- Architecture & Technical Knowledge: Designs and implements changes to single systems, collaborates…