Software Engineer, Backend (Platform)

About Hex Hex is growing our team of builders on a mission to make everyone a data person. Our platform solves key pain points with today’s data and analytics tooling, and empowers anyone to explore data using natural language, with or without code, on trusted context. Thousands of customers like Ramp , Figma , Stubhub , Anthropic, and Gamma love Hex for our beautiful UI, agentic superpowers, and boundless flexibility. Hex has raised over $100M from leading investors like Sequoia, a16z, Snowflake and Amplify. With office hubs in San Francisco and New York, as well as remote team members throughout the US and UK, we’re a high-agency team that ships fast and has fun doing it. Check out our Intro to Hex video and employee handbook to learn more about what it’s like to work at Hex. About the role We are looking for a Senior or Staff-level software engineer to join our Backend Platform team. Our team is responsible for building and maintaining Hex's core compute platform, which serves as the fundamental engine for all code execution, SQL querying, and data processing across the Hex application. Our platform powers everything from the core notebook interface and published applications to the complex data capabilities required by our AI agents. Our mission is twofold: to make the compute platform exceptionally easy to use, develop on, and monitor, while also ensuring it is blazingly fast and performant. Engineers on this team operate at the challenging and rewarding intersection of systems architecture, API design, and deep performance optimization. What you will do On the Backend Platform team you’ll work on projects with high technical complexity and spanning across the stack, from our backend data systems to the frontend of Hex’s collaborative notebook interface. Here are some examples of the kinds of projects you might tackle: Using DuckDB to enable seamless data interoperability between Python and SQL code written by our users or AI agents Building intelligent caching systems to speed up customer data queries Implementing a graph-based dependency framework for optimizing multi-step execution plans Instrumenting complex, multi-language systems to identify performance bottlenecks Building visualizations into the product to help users understand the performance characteristics of their code About you 6+ years of engineering experience working on complex, data-driven systems or applications Expert-level understanding of Python, SQL, jupyter kernels, and/or data warehousing systems Deeply informed on industry trends around data processing, databases, and performant data architectures You love diving into highly complex codebases and have a passion for designing elegant abstractions that improve correctness and developer productivity An inexhaustible desire to understand where every millisecond of time could be going An instinct for strategic thinking and aligning with business and product goals while keeping a healthy balance of velocity and engineering