Staff Cloud Backend Developer at ALSO
Palo Alto, CA
$170,000–$210,000from the description
Jul 14, 2026
Palo Alto, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level backend engineering role at a small EV company, focused on building and scaling the cloud infrastructure that connects and manages a fleet of electric vehicles. Day-to-day work spans IoT data ingestion, API design, event-driven architecture, security, and observability, with additional responsibility for mentoring engineers and shaping technical direction. Suits a seasoned backend engineer with deep experience in AWS, distributed systems, and remote device lifecycle management.
Staff level · 10+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 160 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 120–250
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The role is explicitly titled 'Staff Backend Developer' and the requirements support that band: it demands org-wide architectural influence, mentoring, hiring involvement, and team culture ownership — genuine Staff-level scope, not merely a long-tenured Senior.
AWS sub-services (Lambda, ECR/ECS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM) are enumerated as examples ('e.g.') within the required qualifications block; Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3 are called out individually as the most concrete named services. ECR/ECS and IAM are part of the same AWS requirement and are captured under the AWS skill.
IoT protocols (MQTT, CoAP) and device lifecycle/telemetry experience are listed under 'Familiarity with' — softer language than the rest of the requirements block — so they are marked preferred.
The event-driven/message-queuing requirement names Kafka, Redis, SQS/SNS as examples; Kafka is used as the primary skill name with the others as alternatives.
Authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, SAML, mTLS) are all listed as a single requirement; OAuth2 is the primary with the others as alternatives.
The company is located in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale/San Jose area); no remote option is mentioned.
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