Senior Backend Engineer

Job description

ABOUT DUCKBILL We are developing a SaaS product called Skyway that simplifies financial planning and analysis of cloud billing data for large enterprises with complex cloud spending requirements. Enterprise cloud cost management is a deceptively deep problem we believe the entire cost management space is solving the wrong part of the problem https://www.duckbillhq.com/blog/finops-is-solving-the-wrong-problem/. Our product, Skyway, is a data-heavy product where the backend APIs are vital. Our customers are enterprise finance, engineering, procurement, and FinOps teams making million-dollar decisions based on data that flows through our systems. We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own core services that power the product. WHY YET ANOTHER COST MANAGEMENT PRODUCT? Historically, products in this space have made three fundamental choices: 1. They provided a cost-first data model to customers 2. They assumed the provider’s billing data is correct 3. They chose to solve a specific piece of the cost management problem domain We’re taking the opposite of all three: our world is consumption-first, we’re recalculating the billing for each provider, and we’re working to solve the entire domain. We’ve started with a AWS contract management product and expanding over time to handle forecasting, scenario modeling, cost allocation, chargeback/reinvoicing, practice management, and much more. Our goal is to be the system every enterprise runs their cost management practice on. To accomplish this, we're processing hundreds of millions of rows of billing data per customer, per month. We're turning unstructured commercial contracts into structured data and dynamically recalculating bills using rates from both the contract and public pricing data. We're building a semantic layer that translates technical cloud usage data into business concepts anyone can understand, and we're creating the world's first standardized structure for describing a commercial contract and all of its facets. WHAT MAKES THIS HARD There are three core issues we have to solve: 1. Near-unbounded data cardinality coupled with very large and complex datasets 2. Consumption-first means we need to model the pricing schemes and commercial contract structures for every vendor we support—and we intend to support hundreds-to-thousands 3. Hiding all of this complexity from the customer with excellent product design Here's a sample of the kind of problems you'll help us solve: - A customer's organizational restructure moves $40 million in infrastructure spend from one VP to another overnight—both the historical view and the future view need to be correct, but they need to be correct in different ways. - A customer has 6,000 people in engineering, 2,000+ application IDs, and a highly matrixed reporting structure. "Who owns this?" is almost impossible to answer, but we need to make it simple. To make matters worse, engineering and finance have wildly different perspectives on this. - A SaaS provider changes their pricing model, breaking previous known structures. We need to detect it, adapt to it, and recalculate downstream. - Each provider has dozens of columns in its billing data. When combined with customer-provided data, the dimensions exploded to hundreds or thousands. Given the dimensionality and customer size, the dataset reaches into the terabytes easily. The customer needs to not just be able to query the data, but to also modify the data—and do so faster than a traditional data processing pipeline will allow. WHAT YOU'LL DO Own and evolve the core backend services. Design, build, and operate the services that power Skyway. Establish patterns other engineers follow. Your work is what sits between our data infrastructure and everything the customer sees, and overlaps with both. Build APIs that your teammates love working with. Frontend engineers and data engineers are your primary consumers. You'll design clean, well-documented APIs that people can integrate without constant back-and-forth. Navigate our OLTP/OLAP split. We run Postgres for transactional data (contracts, users, orgs) and ClickHouse for analytical queries (billions of rows of billing data). You need to make confident decisions about where data lives, how to query it, and how to serve sub-second results from both. Care about what the customer sees. While our data pipelines handle the heavy data processing, the backend is where that data starts to become a product. You'll build the validation and transformation logic that ensures what reaches the customer is correct and trustworthy. Work across the entire stack. Collaborate daily with data engineers on ETL and validation patterns, frontend engineers on integration, and product on what to build next. This is a small team and no one works in isolation. Improve how we ship. Help shape and improve our testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response. Deployments should be boring. Incidents should get detected and resolved quickly. Our stack: Python, Flask, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Airflow, React, TypeScript, AWS. What matters more than any specific tool is that you have strong opinions about backend systems and the experience to back them up. HOW WE WORK We work together in the office in San Francisco three days per week, so you must be located in the SF Bay Area and willing to work in the office on a regular basis. You’ll be given more autonomy than you’re comfortable with. We're a small team, around a dozen people today. People joining now are making foundational decisions that need to hold up to future growth in data and customers. We’ve got a lot to do and we hire for expertise and great judgement. We value quick decision-making and a “let’s find out!” attitude. We ship daily. New engineers ship in their first week. We value making progress toward customer desires every day. AI makes us all more capable. We use AI assistance throughout the company heavily and expect you to as well—not just tab-completion, but agents, code review, and whatever else helps you move faster. AI skeptics won’t do well here. ABOUT YOU Your job isn't to just build APIs. It's to solve customer problems using backend code. You think in terms of outcomes, not endpoints. You have opinions about API design, but you care more about whether the customer's experience actually works than whether the API is architecturally elegant. When something breaks in production, you care about why, not just how to get it back up. You have meaningful backend experience or full-stack with a strong backend emphasis. You're strong in Python and SQL, comfortable working across both transactional and analytical workloads. You can reason about when to use Postgres vs. ClickHouse and can diagnose performance issues in both. You don't need domain expertise in cloud billing or FinOps. What matters is experience with data-heavy products where the data is complex, the schemas evolve, and customers depend on the output being right. THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF... - You're a frontend engineer who "can do backend" but doesn't love it - You're a data engineer who wants to stay in pipelines, not build APIs and application logic - You need perfect specs before you start building — we're too early for that - "It works on my machine" is where your ownership ends - You're used to months-long release cycles at enterprise pace OUR UNFAIR ADVANTAGES We've been doing customer research for seven years. Duckbill started life as services firm in 2019 and has worked primarily with large enterprises. Through that work, we've had a front row seat to the hardest problems organizations face. As a result, our vision for Skyway isn't built on hypotheses: it's built on having directly worked these problems alongside the people who live with them every day. Services are a superpower. Every services engagement teaches us something new about customer pains and desires, creating an intelligence loop between services and product. At the scale we’re working at, we are exposed to the hardest cloud cost management problems in the world and can turn those insights directly into product capabilities. (and don’t worry, our engineering team is separate from our services team, so no FDE here) Everyone knows us. We operate the largest AWS community outside of AWS itself—35,000 newsletter subscribers, 5 million podcast downloads, 100,000+ social media followers. Nearly every Fortune 100 company on AWS knows who we are and will take our call. We aren’t having to build a sales pipeline from scratch. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Compensation for this role is a salary range of $180,000-$220,000 plus substantial early stage equity options. We provide a 401(k) and healthcare, vision, and dental with premiums fully covered by the company. Dependents are covered 50%. We offer 4 weeks of PTO, plus unlimited sick leave. ABOUT US We are a small and growing team of ~15, which means you get the opportunity to be on the ground floor of building the product and company. Our founders are domain experts in the market+problem space, bringing deep industry and customer connections in cloud cost management to the product. We're backed by Heavybit and Uncork Capital, having raised $7.75 million http://www.geekwire.com/2026/cloud-and-aws-cost-consultant-duckbill-expands-to-software-raises-7-75m-for-new-skyway-platform/, along with substantial revenue.