Senior Backend Engineer - Response Engineering

San Mateo, CA United States

Who We Are

Designed with simplicity in mind, Verkada's six product lines — video security cameras, access control, environmental sensors, alarms, workplace, and intercoms — provide unparalleled building security through an integrated, cloud-based software platform. Over 33,500 organizations, including 96 companies in the Fortune 500, across 93 countries worldwide trust Verkada as their physical security layer for easier management, intelligent control, and scalable deployments. Founded in 2016 with more than $700M in funding raised to-date, Verkada has expanded rapidly with 15 offices and 2,200+ full-time employees.

About the Role

Verkada’s mission is to protect people and property in a privacy-sensitive manner. Key to that mission is the capability to identify and respond to threats in a highly-reliable and time-sensitive manner. Response Engineering is the team at Verkada tasked with this responsibility.

As a member of Response Engineering, you will be responsible for building a platform used by all Verkada products to orchestrate mitigation actions in response to alarms, like Video Verification, Customer Notifications and Police Dispatch. We build user-facing applications and back-end services that enable customers to manage and resolve incidents in collaboration with emergency dispatch operators and AI-assisted automation workflows.

You’ll be working alongside a small, dynamic team of frontend, backend and firmware engineers to build a response management system that is highly critical to keeping our customers safe and secure. Our team operates as a startup within a startup, so you can expect a lot of autonomy and impact on the direction of how Verkada handles threat management.

What You'll Do

  • Build, test and operate highly scalable, available and fault-tolerant distributed systems while minimizing API and end-to-end latency
  • Design and build a flexible and extensible workflow orchestration engine that handles complex conditional logic and interactions with both internal and external services to execute customer-defined actions like customer notification, call transcription and emergency dispatch
  • Design and build monitoring capability that provides real-time updates to customers about on-going incidents
  • Innovate with bleeding-edge cloud native tools and frameworks like Kubernetes, Kafka, AWS RDS, Temporal, etc.
  • Innovate with AI-driven automation to make threat detection and mitigation more efficient in terms of cost and time
  • Collaborate with product managers, UX designers and front-end engineers to identify and solve customer problems
  • Deliver quality code by following best practices in testing, version control, and continuous deployment

What You Bring

  • 4+ years of industry software engineering experience.
  • Mastery of at least one common server programming language (e.g. Python or Go)
  • Mastery of scalable backend design — Including databases, queues and blob storage
  • Experience working in a fast-paced software development environment.
  • Must be willing and able to work onsite five days per week

Recommended Skills

  • Advanced software architecture and API design experience
  • Good understanding of at least one relational database technology, including performance and load characteristics, transactions and locking
  • Experience with some of the following technologies: Postgres or MySQL, Distributed high concurrency key-value storage (Redis, DynamoDB), Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Embedded systems (Raspbian, Embedded Linux, FreeRTOS)

Culture and Values

  • Self-motivated problem solver: At Verkada, you will tackle large, complex problems with no clear answers. 
  • Teach and learn: You will learn new technologies while being entrusted with the technical ownership of major systems, and we hope to learn something from you in turn. 
  • Growth mindset: As a small, fast-growing startup, every day brings new challenges and opportunities for growth, and we want you to grow with us!

US Employee Benefits

Verkada is committed to fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes the holistic health and wellbeing of our employees and their families by offering comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:

  • Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well-being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans
  • Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage
  • Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options
  • Expanded mental health support
  • Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits
  • Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time
  • Professional development stipend
  • Fertility Stipend
  • Wellness/fitness benefits
  • Healthy lunches provided daily
  • Commuter benefits

Additional Information: 

  • We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.

Annual Pay Range

At Verkada, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A Verkada employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs)

Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full-time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable).

Estimated Annual Pay Range

$130,000 - $280,000 USD

Verkada Is An Equal Opportunity Employer

As an equal opportunity employer, Verkada is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at Verkada will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

Your application will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy. 

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