Senior Backend Engineer - Cloud & Edge AI Pipelines

Verkada is transforming physical security with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI platform spanning video security, access control, environmental sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management. Operating across 30,000+ organizations with a $5.8B valuation, over 2 million deployed devices ingest, analyze, and act on physical data worldwide in real time.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will build and scale the distributed cloud and edge infrastructure powering Verkada’s physical AI security products. You will design low-latency, high-throughput backend services that ingest multimodal video, audio, and sensor streams, coordinate directly with edge devices in the field, and deploy large vision and audio ML models. Working with technologies like Go, Python, Kafka, Temporal, and Postgres, you will architect real-time decisioning workflows that trigger automated threat detection, verification, and emergency dispatch.

Key Responsibilities

• Distributed AI Backend Architecture: Design, build, and maintain low-latency backend microservices powering automated threat detection, real-time alert decisioning, and lockdown workflows.
• Multimodal Data Pipelines: Develop event-driven pipelines for ingesting and processing high-volume video, audio, and sensor streams in real time across cloud backend environments and global edge devices.
• Cloud & Edge Device Coordination: Architect services that orchestrate directly with on-device AI workloads at the edge, balancing compute load between cloud pipelines and field hardware.
• ML Model Integration: Build production infrastructure to deploy, serve, and evaluate large vision and audio machine learning models for real-time video/audio analysis.
• System Performance & Reliability: Optimize backend architectures for high availability, fault tolerance, and sub-second latency using event-driven tools (Kafka, Temporal, Postgres).
• Observability & Prototyping: Rapidly prototype new AI-driven capabilities, establishing best practices for distributed tracing, automated testing, continuous integration, and observability.

Requirements

Distributed Systems & AI Backend Engineering

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating distributed backend systems in production.
• Distributed Systems & Event Architectures: Proven experience designing scalable REST/gRPC APIs, event-driven microservices, and high-throughput real-time streaming architectures.
• Core Systems Languages: Strong proficiency in Go or Python with hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP).
• Data & Streaming Infrastructure: Hands-on experience operating distributed databases, message queues, and workflow orchestration engines (Kafka, Temporal, Postgres).
• ML Model Integration: Familiarity with integrating or deploying machine learning models in production, particularly within video, audio, or multimodal data domains.
• Execution & Ambiguity: Self-directed with a strong ownership mindset, capable of prototyping rapidly and shipping production-grade systems in fast-moving environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building software systems that interact directly with IoT devices, edge compute nodes, embedded cameras, or hardware sensors.
• Hands-on experience with real-time video streaming protocols (RTSP, WebRTC) or media processing pipelines (FFmpeg, GStreamer).
• Track record of building zero-trust, security-conscious backend architectures handling sensitive video/audio streams.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: Estimated pay range of $180,000 – $280,000 USD + Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) + performance incentives.
• Comprehensive Healthcare: 100% employer-paid premiums for employees (80% for dependents) across medical, dental, and vision plans + HSA employer contributions + FSA.
• Family & Wellness: Paid parental leave, fertility stipends/benefits, mental health coaching, and wellness/fitness stipends.
• Perks & Stipends: Daily catered lunches, commuter benefits, professional development stipends, flexible PTO, and paid firmwide extended holidays.
• Visa Sponsorship: Full employment visa sponsorship provided (H-1B transfer, O-1, green card processing).