Staff Backend Engineer, Data Platform

Who we are at Osmo: Osmo is a digital olfaction company, on a mission to give computers a sense of smell to improve the health and wellbeing of human life. Why? Our sense of smell both enriches and saves lives, and has a deep and direct connection to our emotions and memory. Olfactory Intelligence has applications across industries including fragrance, manufacturing, security, medicine, and more. We believe in the power of automation and thoughtfully applied AI/ML to solve problems beyond the reach of human intuition alone. Osmo is headquartered in Elizabeth, NJ, with an additional office in Somerville, MA. Osmo is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer, Data Platform . Our team owns the company's canonical data model and the platform around it: the knowledge graph, the APIs, the integrations in and out of it, and the console that manages it. It spans chemistry, machine learning, sensory science, and manufacturing, where the definitions themselves are often contested. The platform is at the point where the decisions get harder: more domains in the model, more systems reading and writing through us, and more consumers who need the same data shaped differently. You would own the architecture through that transition.

Own consistency across systems that each hold their own copy, under retries, reordering, and partial failure, from ingestion off upstream systems through routing each use to the right destination Lead canonical schema design and evolution while systems are already reading and writing through the model, covering migrations, versioning, and reference data with effective dates so past decisions stay provable Define the system architecture, including systems of record, ownership boundaries, replication strategy, and access control Design the write path where automated and human writes arrive concurrently and sometimes conflict, covering validation, permissions, and audit history complete enough to reconstruct who changed what and why Set the data modeling standards, and be the engineer consulted before shared entities change Required Qualifications The strongest signal for this role is having been accountable for a shared data model that multiple teams depended on: getting those teams to agree what a concept means, encoding that agreement in the schema, and keeping it consistent across systems that each hold their own copy, under retries, reordering, and partial failure. Required Depth in asynchronous and event-driven service design, including idempotency, concurrency control, and the integration patterns that keep systems consistent Advanced data modeling and schema design, including temporal and audit requirements where you have to reconstruct what the system knew at a point in time Sound judgment on technical debt, meaning deliberate tradeoffs, a clear view of what they cost, and the discipline to know where not to compromise Demonstrated impact on team capability, including standards that persisted beyond your involvement and engineers whose growth you can speak to specifically Strong partnership with non-technical domain experts, translating what they ask for into what the data platform should actually build, and technical tradeoffs into decisions they can make Hands-on Python across our stack or close equivalents, including Postgres, BigQuery, GCS, and containerized services and scheduled jobs on Cloud Run Nice to have Establishing data standards or architectural practice in an organization without them Collaborating with scientific or technical domain experts and translating their vocabulary into a data model How we work We use AI coding tools heavily and expect engineers to work that way, with judgment about where output needs review. If this role inspires you we’d encourage you to apply. We are committed to recruiting, developing, and retaining an incredible team optimized for a diversity of thought, background, and approaches. For all Full-Time Employees, compensation is just one component