Judgment Labs — Senior Backend Engineer

Judgment Labs — Senior Backend Engineer Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA (Chinatown) Compensation: $300,000–$450,000 + competitive equity Hiring count: 2 Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B Reports to: Founding team About Judgment Labs Judgment Labs builds infrastructure for Agent Behavior Monitoring (ABM). Where traditional observability logs exceptions and latency, ABM surfaces behavioral anomalies — instruction drift, context retrieval loss — in scaled production environments. Hundreds of teams building autonomous agents rely on Judgment to understand how their systems behave post-deployment, clustering patterns across conversations and workflows, correlating regressions to specific interaction types, and pinpointing where reliability breaks down. Total funding: $30M+ across two rounds in the past five months Investors: Lightspeed, SV Angel, Valor Equity Partners, Nova Global, Chris Manning, Michael Ovitz, Michael Abbott, Cory Levy, Kevin Hartz, and others Stage: Series A Website: judgmentlabs.ai Office: San Francisco (Chinatown) Why Candidates Should Join Early senior seat: Critical early senior hire shaping architecture, code quality, and engineering practices as the company scales. Real ownership: Hands-on technical leadership — writing code daily while owning system design and deployment standards, in direct partnership with the founding team. Frontier problem, strong backing: $30M+ raised in five months from top-tier investors, building reliability infrastructure for the fast-growing AI agent space. Perks: Full benefits package, Equinox membership, competitive compensation and equity. The Role An early senior backend hire to mature Judgment's software systems and engineering practices as it scales. A hands-on technical leader working deeply in backend systems and OLAP infrastructure (ClickHouse), mentoring a growing engineering team, and partnering directly with founders on scalability and reliability. What You'll Be Doing Lead backend development hands-on while guiding system architecture and design decisions across the team. Improve code quality, reduce technical debt, and implement scalable software practices as volume grows. Build and optimize backend systems against columnar/OLAP databases like ClickHouse to power ABM at production scale. Mentor junior engineers and establish a culture of technical excellence and engineering maturity. Partner with founders on key decisions around system reliability, scalability, and deployment processes. Tech stack: Backend systems + columnar/OLAP databases (ClickHouse); cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines at scale. Requirements 5–8 years backend at VC-backed or FAANG company Production experience with ClickHouse or similar OLAP DBs Hands-on system design and architecture ownership Mentored junior engineers previously SF in-person, 5 days, Chinatown Green Flags Owned backend architecture decisions at scale Built analytical or observability infrastructure previously Worked with high-volume time-series or event data Strong mentorship track record with junior engineers Comfort in Chinatown SF, 5-day in-office culture Red Flags 8+ yrs but no recent hands-on coding Only worked in monolithic CRUD systems Never owned a system end-to-end in production Needs structured roadmap to execute Management-track, no hands-on coding recently Remote or hybrid-only preference Role Details Salary — $300,000–$450,000 Equity — Competitive (unspecified %) On-site policy — On-site, San Francisco (Chinatown); 5 days per Requirements (screening form asks Mon–Sat — confirm actual cadence with Contrario) Visa sponsorship — H-1B available Employment type — Full-time Location — San Francisco, CA (Chinatown) Screening Questions Where are you currently located? LinkedIn URL Are you legally authorized to work in the United States? Will you require work sponsorship now and/or in the future? Are you located in the San Francisco-area and/or willing to relocate? Are you willing to work on-site in our San Francisco office Monday–Saturday? Interview Process Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidate awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Founder vibe check (30 min) — Plus an optional 15-min deeper dive into technical projects. Stage 3 — System Design — System design interview. Stage 4 — API Design — API design interview. Stage 5 — Work Trial — Hands-on work trial. Stage 6 — Offer Extended Stage 7 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.