Senior Backend Engineer (Cloud Infrastructure)

Senior Backend Engineer (Cloud Infrastructure)

About Niobium

Niobium Microsystems is unlocking the full potential of sensitive data without compromising privacy.

We believe organizations shouldn't have to choose between data security and data utility. The Niobium Encrypted Cloud is a high-performance Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to make encrypted computation easier, faster, and practical for real-world applications. By leveraging our custom accelerators within a cloud environment, we enable customers to process their most proprietary information while it remains fully encrypted. With Niobium, data is never decrypted, never exposed, and never vulnerable—allowing you to compute with confidence.

Founded as a 2021 spinout from Galois, Inc., a world-class security and computing systems research and development company, Niobium’s team combines decades of experience in advanced semiconductor design with a record of delivering world class solutions.

About This Role

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help architect, build, and deploy the initial instance of the Niobium Encrypted Cloud. In this role, you won't just be building standard CRUD APIs. You will build the orchestration engine that manages a hybrid fleet of VMs (AWS/GCP) as well as servers containing our proprietary hardware accelerators (FPGAs and ASICs). You will write the code that spins up secure systems, routes compute tasks to specific hardware tiers, and ensures that our "Zero Trust" promise remains unbreakable.

You will be one of the first 5 engineers on the cloud team and your code will define the architecture for years to come. You will work directly with hardware engineers building the world's fastest FHE chips, bridging the gap between silicon and software.

Responsibilities

• The Orchestration Layer: Build the control plane that automatically provisions client-server environments. When a user requests an FHE client/server pair, your code will spin up the necessary server VMs attached to our dedicated FPGA/ASIC hardware along with a client VM in AWS/GCP.
• Hardware Abstraction APIs: Create the internal APIs that allow our software to treat a room full of FPGAs as a scalable cloud resource. You will abstract the complexity of bare-metal hardware management away from the user.
• The "Niobium CLI" Backbone: Design and implement the public-facing APIs that power our Command Line Interface (CLI) and Web Console, allowing developers to manage keys, launch jobs, and retrieve results programmatically.
• Federated Data Connectors: Build secure pipelines (using S3/GCS protocols) that allow customers to stream encrypted data from their existing cloud buckets into the Niobium Cloud for processing.
• System Design: Design high-throughput, low-latency microservices (likely in Go, Rust, or Python) that handle job scheduling and resource allocation.
• Infrastructure as Code: deeply integrate with Terraform, Kubernetes, and Ansible to automate the deployment of the entire cloud stack.
• Security Implementation: Implement rigorous authentication and authorization (OAuth/OIDC) protocols. Since we never hold customer keys, you will architect workflows that facilitate "Bring Your Own Key" (BYOK) without ever exposing secrets to our backend.
• Performance Tuning: Optimize hardware performance. In our world, latency matters, and you will ensure the Cloud feels as fast as the local hardware.
• Hands-On Support: May be required to work on-site at data centers during deployments, expansions, or critical break-fix situations.
• Customer & Partner Enablement: Support customers and partners via ticketing systems and other support channels, with a focus on problem-solving and customer success.
• On-Call Coverage: Occasional on-call availability may be required.

Required Technical Expertise

• 4+ years of Backend Engineering experience, specifically in building cloud services, platforms, or distributed systems.
• Fluency in Go, Rust, or Python. You write clean, well-documented/self-documenting code.
• Public Cloud Deep Dive: You know the AWS/GCP APIs inside out (EC2, IAM, VPC peering, S3). You understand how to manipulate cloud resources programmatically.
• Containerization Mastery: Deep experience with Kubernetes (K8s) and Docker. You know how to manage stateful workloads and hardware device plugins in a cluster.
• API Design: Experience building robust REST or gRPC APIs for external developers.
• Bonus: Experience working with "bare metal" provisioning, HPC schedulers (like Slurm), or interacting with hardware drivers/firmware.
  

Location

Niobium is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Employees are primarily located coast to coast across the U.S. This role is a remote position and we are seeking a candidate that lives near an ideal data center location (like Texas, central Washington, and Iowa) so that the data center can be co-located with the cloud lead and other cloud employees.

Benefits

Niobium offers a highly competitive benefits program to support employees and their families, including:

• Competitive salaries 
• Equity in the form of Incentive Stock Options (ISO)
• Employer paid medical insurance plan
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contributions
• Dental and vision reimbursement account (HRA)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Flexible work location with remote options
• Flexible time off