Software Engineer, Backend

ABOUT NORMAL COMPUTING Normal Computing builds silicon that turns thermal noise from an obstacle into a computational resource. Conventional chips spend most of their energy forcing determinism onto physics; ours compute with it. Stochastic, in-memory, asynchronous: the result is 10-100× more AI inference per dollar, per watt. We co-design the full stack: AI-native EDA systems in production with the world's largest semiconductor companies, and the advanced ASICs they make possible. Backed by $85M+ from the world's leading deep-tech investors and built by scientists, engineers, and operators from the labs that built modern computing. Normal works as one team across New York, Silicon Valley, London, Copenhagen, and Seoul. We hire people who want the hardest version of their craft, across every discipline, at every seniority. THE ROLE Normal is building software for semiconductor engineers: a local CLI that works inside real chip design environments, a web product for managing projects and reviewing results, and backend services that coordinate long-running work across both. Making those pieces feel like one dependable product is a backend engineering problem. This role spans the backend surface behind that product. Depending on the project, you might design an API shared by several services, evolve a database model without breaking existing sessions, make a state transition idempotent, improve a local agent loop, or remove a deployment or performance bottleneck. The common thread is production software with real state, real failure modes, and users with complex workflows. We use AI in the product, but this is not an ML role and prior experience with agents is not required. We are looking for backend engineers who enjoy making complex systems clear, reliable, and easy to operate. EXAMPLES OF WHAT YOU MIGHT WORK ON Your scope will depend on your experience, interests, and the team’s priorities. You would likely go deep in a few of these areas rather than own all of them: - Design stable, well-typed interfaces across CLI, web, and backend services. - Evolve Postgres schemas, migrations, event histories, and other durable state. - Build lifecycle, queueing, retry, cancellation, idempotency, and recovery behavior for long-running work. - Improve software that runs across developer machines and containerized environments. - Make failures easier to diagnose through metrics, traces, structured logs, health checks, and operator tooling. - Improve how changes are tested, packaged, migrated, deployed, and recovered. - Find and remove performance bottlenecks in APIs, database access, event processing, and execution paths. - Deliver product changes that cross repositories, languages, and service boundaries. WHAT MAKES YOU A GREAT FIT - 4+ years of software engineering experience and a track record of shipping backend systems that other people depend on. - Experience designing APIs and data models, and reasoning clearly about concurrency and state. - Experience operating production services where reliability, observability, maintainability, and performance matter. - Comfort reasoning about distributed failure modes such as retries, partial completion, duplicate work, cancellation, and recovery. - The ability to debug across boundaries—from a client or CLI through services, databases, and deployment infrastructure. - Pragmatic judgment about when to invest in a durable abstraction and when to ship the straightforward version. - Range: you have gone deep in at least one area and can become productive in an unfamiliar codebase or technical domain. - A product mindset: you care whether the system is understandable and dependable for the people using it, not only whether the code is correct. BONUS POINTS Experience with any of the following is helpful, but not required: - Postgres, Redis or Valkey, event-driven architectures, or high-volume stateful services - Kubernetes, containers, cloud infrastructure, or deploying software in resource-constrained, on-premises customer environments - Developer tools, CLIs, workflow engines, job schedulers, or distributed execution systems - Semiconductors, EDA, or hardware engineering workflows Equal Employment Opportunity Statement Normal Computing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status. Accessibility Accommodations Normal Computing is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@normalcomputing.com. Privacy Notice By submitting your application, you agree that Normal Computing may collect, use, and store your personal information for employment-related purposes in accordance with our Privacy Policy.