Job Specifications
About the job
About PlayerZero
PlayerZero is building a self‑healing system for software—automating defect detection, diagnosis, and remediation so developers ship with confidence. Teams use PlayerZero to spot issues before customers do, pinpoint root causes fast, and close the loop from incident to fix.
Our platform includes capabilities like Agentic Debugging and Code Simulations that let engineers reproduce complex scenarios, reason about failures, and validate fixes safely and quickly.
The role
You will lead the design and development of distributed services that power PlayerZero's agentic workflows and simulations—owning systems end‑to‑end from architecture to operations. You'll work across the stack (frontend when needed), but your center of gravity is backend, reliability, and scale. As a senior/lead, you set technical direction, raise the bar for code and design quality, and mentor others.
Location
The Team works in Atlanta, GA in a hybrid capacity in the tech square area next to Georgia Tech.
What you’ll do
Own and evolve core microservices: design APIs, data models, and event flows for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads.
Build resilient, observable systems: implement SLOs, metrics, tracing, and graceful degradation; drive incident response and postmortems.
Design asynchronous and event‑driven architectures (queues/streams, sagas, idempotency, backpressure, retries, DLQs).
Ship platform capabilities that support Agentic Debugging and Code Simulations, including safe execution sandboxes and workflow orchestration.
Collaborate with product/design to scope problems, write technical specs, and deliver iterative outcomes.
Improve developer experience: CI/CD, test strategy, feature flags, trunk‑based development, and automation.
Provide technical leadership: run design reviews, mentor engineers, and influence cross‑team architecture.
Contribute to the web UI (React/TypeScript) as needed to deliver end‑to‑end features.
What you’ll bring
7+ years building production software, with 3+ years designing and operating distributed, microservices‑based systems.
Deep expertise in at least one backend language (Go, Java/Kotlin, Rust, Python, or TypeScript/Node) and willingness to learn others.
Strong foundation in systems design: consistency models, CAP tradeoffs, transactions/sagas, caching, partitions, circuit breaking, rate limiting.
Proficiency with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containers/Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), and secure networking.
Data systems experience: relational (Postgres/MySQL), caches (Redis), search/analytics (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, ClickHouse/BigQuery), and schema evolution.
Eventing/streaming (Kafka, Pulsar, Pub/Sub, or SQS/SNS) and designing idempotent, exactly‑once‑like processing.
API design (REST and/or GraphQL), authN/Z (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT), and secure service‑to‑service communication.
Strong testing discipline (unit, integration, property‑based, load) and a bias for observability (OpenTelemetry, metrics, tracing, logging).
Excellent written/spoken communication; comfortable leading designs and mentoring.
Nice to have
Experience with developer tools, observability, or incident management products.
Background in program analysis, sandboxing, or workflow engines; familiarity with LLM/agent systems.
Data privacy and security fundamentals; compliance‑aware design.
What success looks like
90 days: Own a service end‑to‑end, add meaningful observability, and ship a cross‑functional feature that touches backend and UI.
6 months: Lead a system design that improves reliability or latency by 30%+, and mentor an engineer through a complex project.
12 months: Be a go‑to architect for a product area; simplify a critical subsystem and reduce operational toil meaningfully.
Our stack
Backend: Go and/or TypeScript/Node; some Python for data/ML glue.
Frontend: React + TypeScript.
Data: Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse/BigQuery; Kafka/SNS/SQS for events.
Infra: AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Feature Flags, OpenTelemetry.
Why join PlayerZero
Mission with leverage: help engineers ship self‑healing software by default.
Hard, meaningful problems: distributed systems, correctness at scale, and agentic workflows that make developers measurably faster.
High‑trust culture: autonomy, ownership, and a bias for action.
Our Supporters
Tackling the challenges of such a vast and complex industry is an enormous undertaking. We've raised a Series A funding and are backed by leading investors who share our vision to help us on this journey.
Foundation Capital (Ashu Garg, Jaya Gupta)
WndrCo (Sujay Jaswa, ChenLi Wang)
Green Bay Ventures (Anthony Schiller, Dick Kramlich)
Matei Zaharia (Founder & CTO, Databricks)
Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel)
Dylan Field (Founder & CEO, Figma)
Drew Houston (Founder & CEO, Dropbox)
Peter Bailis (CTO, Workday)
Oliver Jay (MD International, OpenAI)
John Lilly (ex CEO, Mozilla)
Bernard Kim (CEO, Match Group)
Others