San Francisco, CA

Salary
$190,000
Posted
Aug 5, 2026
Location
San Francisco, CA
Last confirmed open
Sep 25, 2026

What this job asks for AI summary

A backend/platform software engineering role at a San Francisco grid-tech startup, focused on building and operating a distributed control system for a large fleet of IoT sensors deployed on electrical infrastructure. The work centers on high-volume, event-driven telemetry pipelines, device command processing, observability, and incident response, with significant architectural ownership as an early team member.

Senior level · 5+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time

Pay in the description: $190,000–$2,150,000

Quick apply — this platform usually takes a CV and a few fields.

Must have (4)
distributed systems · 5+ yrsKafka, AWS, Redpanda or Apache PulsarGrafana or LokiLinux
Nice to have (8)
TCP/UDP/QUICDNSTLSIoTApollo Router or GraphQLKubernetesGitOpsTerraform

“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.

Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.

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 860 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 640–1,600

Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.

What won't set you apart
Linux45%

Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.

What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is around 5% above it.

Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 7, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.

Why we read it this way (6)

The posted compensation range of $190,000–$2,150,000/year appears to contain a typo (the upper bound is implausibly high for an individual-contributor role); hiring managers should verify the intended maximum before publishing.

The required skills section names Kafka, Kinesis, Redpanda, and Apache Pulsar as a group of alternatives — one of these streaming platforms is required, not all four independently.

Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki are similarly listed as a group of alternatives for the observability/monitoring requirement.

All Bonus Skills (transport-layer protocols, networking/DNS/TLS/security, IoT/sensing systems, Apollo Router/GraphQL, Kubernetes/GitOps/IaC) are listed under an explicit 'Bonus Skills' heading and are treated as preferred.

Infrastructure-as-Code is listed under Bonus Skills alongside Kubernetes and GitOps; Terraform is the most common IaC tool and is used as the representative skill name.

'Distributed systems' is used as the skill name to represent the required 5+ years of hands-on experience with distributed, event-driven, cloud-native systems, as no single named technology was specified for that gate.

Read the full posting

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