Technical Lead, Backend (Civil Aviation)

Job description

About Air Space Intelligence ASI's mission-critical technology powers decision-making across aviation, defense, energy, and other critical infrastructure domains. Backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Renegade Partners, ASI delivers operational decision superiority—compressing days of analysis into seconds of action. ASI is leading the way and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. About the Civil Aviation Team We are modernizing America’s air traffic control system on an accelerated timeline, tackling one of the world’s most complex real-time optimization challenges: safely coordinating tens of thousands of daily flights in a dynamic, safety-critical environment. Our team is building next-generation trajectory prediction and decision-support systems while preparing the airspace for emerging technologies like commercial space operations and advanced air mobility. This mission-critical work demands exceptional precision, resilience, and reliability to support the safety and efficiency of the national airspace. What You Will Do: As Technical Lead for the Civil Aviation team, you will define the architectural foundations of a backend system that will operate at the center of U.S. air travel for the next decade and beyond. This isn't a greenfield experiment. This is a platform that needs to be right the first time and maintainable by future engineers who had no hand in building it. The core technical challenge is data fusion at operational scale: ingesting disparate, noisy, and potentially conflicting data streams, from radar, flight plans, weather systems, operator inputs, and more, and resolving them into a single, authoritative view of the world. From there, the system projects that state forward in time, enabling optimization across a complex set of competing conditions and constraints. The person in this role needs to have strong intuitions about how to model uncertainty, how to reason about data provenance and confidence, and how to build systems that degrade gracefully when inputs are incomplete or wrong. You'll set and enforce the design principles that keep complexity manageable as the system grows: strict module boundaries, clean abstractions, and interfaces that don't leak implementation details. You'll make the hard calls about what belongs where, and explain them clearly enough that your team internalizes the reasoning, not just the rule. You'll lead a small team of engineers while staying hands-on, guiding implementation from design through delivery. You'll collaborate closely with product, platform, and domain experts. Your north star is a system that remains comprehensible and extensible long after the initial build. What We Value: - Strong experience building production-grade backend or distributed systems where strong design principles make the difference in maintainability, scalability, and performance. - Proficiency in at least one modern programming language. We work in Rust and Python and expect you to have the foundation to quickly learn these languages. - Experience with real-time or near-real-time data pipelines where latency and correctness are both constraints, not trade-offs. - Experience with data integration, data storage, data processing, and data modeling systems. - Experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures. - Experience leading small engineering teams (~3 - 8 engineers) while remaining hands-on. - Ability to own systems end-to-end, from design through production operation. - Track record of setting technical direction and driving execution across projects or product areas. - Strong ability to navigate complex, multi-system environments with evolving data models. - High bar for engineering quality, reliability, and operational excellence. - Strong collaboration skills and ability to work across teams in a mission-critical environment. - Exposure to high-availability systems (e.g., “four nines” reliability) is a strong plus. - Proficient in leveraging modern LLM tools to accelerate development workflows and enhance code quality. - Domain experience in aviation, mapping, geospatial systems, or any field where the physical world is the source of truth and data is always an approximation of it is a strong plus. How We Hire: We look at the interview process not as a screening or test, but rather as an opportunity to simulate what it would look like working together. We build the interview process around you. ASI works with export-controlled technology and restricted U.S. Government data, including on contracts mandating U.S. immigration status and location restrictions for performing personnel. Employment offers are contingent on ability to timely obtain all required authorizations for contemplated job duties.