Staff Engineer (Backend & Data Systems) at Sema

Sema is a technology company that helps large investors and organizations assess legal risks and software code quality. Its key products include the Product Roadmap Radar, which transforms engineering data into clear insights for leaders, and Comprehensive Codebase Scans, which analyze code quality, tech debt, and compliance for investors and product teams.

Sema has evaluated code within organizations worth over $1 trillion and serves 7 of the 9 largest global investors, alongside strategic and venture capital firms.

🔎 The team is currently looking for a Staff Engineer (Backend & Data Systems) to join their senior engineering team and drive the development of scalable data pipelines and backend systems.

💻 Responsibilities:

Write clean, maintainable, and efficient Python code.

• Design and implement robust, reusable data pipelines and processing jobs.
• Own core backend logic for ingesting, transforming, and analyzing large datasets.
• Collaborate with engineers to define technical direction, review code, and ship high-impact features quickly.
• Ensure high standards of type safety, testing, and error handling.
• Evolve internal coding practices, tools, and workflows.
• Debug production issues and optimize performance across services.
• Lead the development of a Python-based agent for client-side code analysis.

💪 Required Experience:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, focusing on backend systems and data processing.
• Strong Python skills, including best practices for code structure, type safety, and testing.
• Proven experience designing and operating data pipelines at scale.
• Familiarity with distributed systems or asynchronous processing jobs.
• Solid understanding of data modeling, schema design, and structured data formats.
• Experience with AWS (S3, RDS, EC2, Lambda, EventBridge, SQS).
• Fluent English for daily asynchronous communication.

💫 Nice to Have:

• Experience building internal tools or engineering data processing systems.
• Familiarity with GitHub Actions, Docker, Terraform.
• High code quality standards and a drive for continuous improvement.
• Exposure to scalable systems for code analytics or developer insights.

💵 What Sema Offers:

• Competitive salary, negotiated individually depending on experience.
• Remote-first culture, flexible hours, and a focus on real impact—not bureaucracy
• Minimal meetings and a high-performance, low-drama environment.
• Opportunity to work on systems analyzing hundreds of codebases worth billions of dollars.
• Access to Claude GenAI services as a work tool.