Full Job Description
As a Senior Software Engineer at Upwave, you'll be a full-stack problem solver with a backend focus-building the APIs, data pipelines, and systems that power our brand measurement platform. Your work will process billions of ad impressions, manage complex data workflows, and deliver insights that inform marketing decisions for the world's biggest brands.
You'll collaborate across engineering, product, and data science to ship high-impact features end-to-end, scale our platform for the next phase of growth, and help define the next generation of brand measurement.
What you will do:
Build AI-powered customer experiences - integrate LLMs and advanced causal inference techniques into production workflows that automatically generate data visualizations, synthesize campaign performance into natural language insights, and help enterprise customers understand and optimize their advertising through our AI analyst "Bayes."
Design and build scalable backend systems -develop microservices and RESTful APIs that power the analytics platform behind the world's top brand campaigns.
Contribute across the stack - work from backend APIs to Python analytics services to React frontends, delivering complete features that combine sophisticated data analysis with intuitive user experiences.
Engineer data pipelines at scale - design and operate systems that process massive volumes of ad and survey data with MySQL, DynamoDB, and AWS (S3, Lambda, EMR, Kinesis Firehose).
Improve reliability and performance - deploy services on Kubernetes and AWS, automate deployments via CI/CD, monitor with DataDog and Sentry, and continuously raise the bar for operational excellence
Collaborate deeply - work closely with Product and Data Science to productionize statistical models, integrate advanced analytics into customer-facing tools, and bring cutting-edge AI capabilities to enterprise customers.
Deliver insights that move millions - enable brand lift analytics and real-time campaign insights by building reliable, high-throughput systems. Multi-million dollar advertising decisions hinge on our recommendations.
About you:
You're an experienced engineer (5+ years) who thrives on solving complex problems across APIs, data systems, and distributed infrastructure. You care about clean architecture, reliable systems, and measurable customer impact.
You've built powerful, intuitive, API-driven products for professional users.. You're comfortable across the stack, with experience in RDBMS-backed backends using Spring Boot, Django, Rails, or Express, and single-page frontends built in React, Vue, or Angular.
You understand and enjoy programming. You're fluent in the modern landscape of UI frameworks, API and microservice architectures, databases, and cloud platforms-and know when to use the right tool for the job.
You embrace modern AI-powered development tools to move faster and code smarter. You use technologies like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub CoPilot to automate routine work, explore ideas quickly, and focus your time on higher-value system design and innovation.
You value structured software development practices-testing, documentation, CI/CD, and code review-and care about building maintainable systems that scale.
You believe developers should operate what they build. You think about observability, cost, and reliability from day one, and design systems that are easy to deploy and maintain. You've built in the cloud and know both its power and pitfalls.
You like turning ideas into tools that make real customers more effective. You collaborate closely with Product to design features that solve real-world problems and delight users.
You mentor others, share knowledge freely, and understand that healthy human systems are the foundation of healthy technical systems. Teammates look to you for guidance.
You want to understand how things work and why. You care more about the best idea winning than whose idea it is.
You take responsibility, move quickly to fix problems, and take pride in establishing areas of deep expertise in a fast-changing environment.
You believe high-trust, inclusive teams outperform individuals. You communicate clearly and compassionately, and contribute to a culture where people enjoy working together.
Bonus points:
Have worked with modern backend ecosystems like Java/Kotlin/Groovy (Spring Boot or Grails) and know how to design APIs that scale elegantly.
Are fluent with data systems such as MySQL, DynamoDB, and Presto, and understand the tradeoffs between relational and NoSQL storage.
Have built cloud-native applications on AWS, especially using Kubernetes and Terraform for automation and scalability.
Know your way around modern front-end frameworks like React/Redux and enjoy collaborating up and down the stack.
Have startup DNA-you're comfortable with ambiguity, iterate fast, and make pragmatic technical decisions.
Bring experience from AdTech, MarTech, or measurement platforms, or are excited to learn how AI and large-scale data intersect in this space.
Please note: Our interview process will require an in-person meeting.
Why You'll Like Working Here:
Engineering-first company: Upwave's success depends on high-velocity innovation, and we believe high velocity comes from high efficiency, not high effort. We set priorities rather than deadlines, we don't crunch, we work reasonable hours, and engineers actually take vacations.
Modern tech stack: Python analytics, Kotlin/Java APIs, event streaming (100k+ RPM), DynamoDB, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, LLM orchestration.
Impact at scale: Your code processes billions of advertising events and directly influences multi-million dollar decisions by Fortune 500 brands.
Autonomy and ownership: Our engineers lead projects from design through deployment and monitoring.
Ambitious but humble culture: We take our work seriously but never ourselves. Upwavers collaborate hard and support each other generously. We screen for people who are both exceptionally talented and genuinely kind.
Remote-first team: Our diverse team spans half the globe (but only one half, to ensure everyone can talk live when we need to). We balance synchronous core hours with flexibility to create a work environment that enables both deep collaboration and deep work.
Additional Information:
The annual base salary range for this role is $150,000 - $175,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for the new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.
