Staff Backend Software Engineer

About Sense

Check out and join our energetic team at Sense! We’re a VC-backed, post-Series C climate tech company entering our next stage of growth. We’re located in Central Square, Cambridge and are passionate about our mission! This is a great opportunity to work with a team of experienced entrepreneurs creating technology that will really make a difference in the world. Our mission is to reduce global carbon emissions by making homes smart and efficient, and we're looking to make an impact at scale: Sense's technology has the potential to prevent one gigaton of carbon from entering the atmosphere every year.

We're looking for talented self-starters who want to be part of the energy transformation and are ready, willing, and able to tackle tough challenges and complex technical problems. When you join the Sense team, you're helping us build a cleaner, more resilient future.

Sense supports a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and is an equal-opportunity employer. We strive to foster an engaging, respectful, and supportive community where everyone feels empowered to do their best work.

Role Overview

As a Staff Backend Engineer at Sense, you’ll use your expertise to expand the capabilities of our cloud platform and enable the next generation of new product features. You will be a key contributor and leader maintaining and scaling a high-quality production service. You should be:

• Focused on delivering functionality that benefits the customer and provides real value
• Able to partner effectively with a cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, and engineering managers across multiple disciplines.
• Ready to work with embedded engineers to develop systems that integrate with various hardware platforms.
• Comfortable working closely with partners and customers to ensure success
• Excited about high-volume, realtime data and solving the challenges it poses.
• Interested in building high-availability, performant, and scalable systems.
• Tenacious when tracking down production issues, digging into metrics and logs as needed to solve problems.
• Ready to own team projects from design and implementation to testing, deployment, and bug fixing. Complete day-to-day work autonomously and identify gaps in requirements or processes, proactively suggesting improvements.
• Familiar and comfortable with AI coding practices
• A strong leader and outspoken advocate for engineering best practices and team collaboration.

Work Model

This position is ideally a hybrid work model, but fully remote candidates will be considered. Our office is in Cambridge, MA and we have a mix of in-person, hybrid and remote employees.

The ideal candidate will have experience with the following:

• 8+ years of professional experience with a degree in a relevant field and proven track record in professional software engineering
• Mastery of Java, Linux, and AWS
• Experienced at designing clean, usable REST APIs and integrating with partner systems
• Strong understanding of how to apply security and data privacy principles within your specific engineering domain
• DevOps and SRE experience maintaining a production environment
• Cassandra, MySQL, Kafka, and Python experience is a plus
• Energy industry or climate tech experience is a plus
• Authorized to work in the US
• Compensation is 180 - 200k

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (401k, IRA)
• Life Insurance (Basic, Voluntary & AD&D)
• Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick & Public Holidays)
• Family Leave (Maternity, Paternity)
• Short Term & Long Term Disability
• Training & Development
• Work From Home
• Free Food & Snacks
• Wellness Resources
• Stock Option Plan