Staff Backend Engineer, Platform Engineering - KDE Query

Kentik is the network intelligence platform for modern infrastructure teams. Unlike traditional monitoring and observability tools, we demystify complex network operations, enabling organizations to deliver applications and innovation at scale. Built by network experts to make critical insight accessible to every engineer, Kentik is the real-time source of truth that understands every network in context — from data center to cloud to the internet. This single platform unifies and correlates cloud, device, flow, and synthetic data to turn telemetry into action. Market leaders like Akamai, Booking.com, Dropbox, and Zoom rely on Kentik to run, manage, and optimize their networks.

Kentik's Platform Engineering group is responsible for storing, enriching, and querying traffic metadata and metrics from the world's largest networks. Our platform actively monitors infrastructure, triggers automated responses to outages and attacks, and is critical to delivering complete network observability to our customers. Our platform ingests trillions of records and serves hundreds of thousands of queries for our users each day.  The scale that this group services is tremendous.  

Platform Engineering consists of 3 teams; (1) Ingest, (2) KDE Storage and Query, (3) Network Data. As a staff engineer in platform engineering on the KDE Query Team, you will have the opportunity to co-own, design, and scale a high-performance, data-intensive platform query layer that services the network monitoring data from the most influential companies on the internet.
We have built a team of world-class engineers, network experts, and technology thought leaders in a remote-friendly culture from day one. While prior experience in a remote environment is not required, we highly value strong collaboration and communication skills, and a high level of independence and autonomy.

• Act as a lead Individual Contributor to improve Query services, focusing on query speeds,  throughput, and latency
• Collaborate with other engineering, support, and sales teams to drive platform-wide query standards.
• Solve high-visibility, challenging engineering problems related to the data-intensive query engine.

Studies have shown that some candidates tend to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. We encourage you to apply if you meet most of the criteria - even if you don’t match all of the qualifications, your skills and experience could be valuable in this role!

• 5+ years of experience in backend development using Go/C/Rust, with a strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and high-throughput data pipelines. 
• Deep experience with query planning, optimization, and execution in distributed environments, is a big plus.
• Proven track record of optimizing distributed systems to handle hundreds of millions of data points per second.
• A passion to grow personally and contribute to our team.
• Strong collaboration skills, essential for Kentik's remote-friendly culture.

• Core Engine: Primarily written in Go.
• Application Layer: Node.js + Express for application serving and React as the primary UI framework.
• Tooling: JS and Python for tooling and scripting.
• Infrastructure & Messaging: Kafka for streaming pipelines, Redis for caching, and Postgres/MySQL for metadata.
• APIs & Routing: REST/JSON and gRPC endpoints via HAProxy and Envoy.
• Operations: GitHub for source control, Jenkins for CI/CD, and Jira for project tracking.

Kentik is a fully remote company that operates globally. We seek professionals that will help us thrive as an organization, and in turn, to broaden and enhance your career. We’re very thorough in the interview process to understand your skills and how they will relate to your successful growth here at Kentik. Our compensation philosophy encompasses a fair program for all in order to attract, engage and retain talented individuals who will drive our business and wow our customers.

The compensation range for this position is: $190,000 –  $225,000. This range reflects the low and high end of the U.S. compensation range Kentik reasonably and generally expects to pay the hired candidate in this role. The actual compensation offered may be lower or higher than the stated range depending on various factors, including but not limited to:

• Experience with the skill sets required for success
• Demonstrated competencies and potential 
• A geographic market-based approach

In addition to a great career opportunity, Kentik offers stellar benefits for our employees, which include:

• 100% of premiums are paid by company for health, vision and dental coverage for you and your dependents
• Additionally, an annual Health Reimbursement Account (HRA) of $3,000 for an individual or $4,500 for a family
• Paid family & medical leave 
• Open PTO, a quarterly Wellness Day, and a minimum of 10 paid holidays
• 401(k) retirement account
• Home office reimbursement 
• Stock options

Note: Benefits are as listed for all US full-time employees. For compensation, international applicants will be treated equitably in relation to the laws applicable within the countries in which we operate.

The true meaning of Kentik is visibility. We’re committed to making sure everyone feels empowered to use their voice, has a sense of belonging, and is represented at Kentik. 

We don’t look for individuals who fit the culture, but those who will continue to add to the culture.
We encourage everyone to apply, especially those individuals who are underrepresented in the industry: people of color, LGBTQI+ community, women, individuals with disabilities (both seen and unseen), veterans, and people of any age or family status. 

Kentik is committed to creating an inclusive interview process. If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please reach out to [email protected].

Come as you are!
You will be working at a fast-growing, well-funded startup alongside industry thought leaders and network aficionados as we build the future of observability and set the high bar for how network operations and digital businesses should run. With a competitive salary and amazing benefits on top of the meaningful and challenging projects you’ll take on, we’re sure you’ll enjoy joining the Kentik team.

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