Staff 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. We are looking for a Staff or Principal-level software engineer to join our Compute team. Hex's Compute team owns one of the hardest performance problems in the product: our users do everything from analyzing 100-line CSV files to querying petabyte-scale Snowflake tables, and in all cases they expect it to feel fast. We power a technical product that our customers trust to accurately retrieve data from their own systems to then efficiently execute polyglot backed analytics workflows. This is a backend-heavy role with a focus on computation, performance, data systems design, and systems architecture. You'll drive architectural decisions that compound over years, write the technical designs that shape how the team builds, and directly influence the long-term trajectory of Hex's compute platform — all while staying deeply hands-on in the codebase. What you will do: Evolve Hex's execution architecture — the graph-based system that compiles, plans, and runs user notebooks — including proposing and building entirely new compute components that support faster, smarter execution Drive parallel execution strategies and caching approaches that reduce latency and minimize unnecessary round trips to external data warehouses Instrument complex systems to surface and diagnose performance problems to give the team and our customers a much clearer picture of where time is being spent Collaborate across engineering and product to support new platform capabilities, such as building an internal query language that compiles to the appropriate dialect for any connected warehouse Author and review technical proposals, and mentor engineers to implement ambitious designs effectively Propose and roadmap long-term designs with clear milestones across quarters About You: 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with a strong focus on computation, performance, database/storage optimization, and systems architecture Experience with parallel execution strategies, caching strategies, and the trade-offs involved in remote data warehouse computation. Strong systems thinker with solid intuitions around storage, database performance, algorithms, and data structures A track record of solving difficult, l