---
title: 'Staff Backend Engineer, Data Platform at Osmo'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-engineer-data-platform-osmo-elizabeth-2ajgtzg4na5f'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Staff Backend Engineer, Data Platform at Osmo

- **Company:** Osmo
- **Location:** Elizabeth, NJ
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/osmo/2f03346c-c9d8-4e8a-81c2-5732e58445ee

## Job description

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.

We're headquartered in Elizabeth, NJ, with an additional office in Somerville, MA. We provide complimentary shuttle service from Brooklyn and Newark, NJ. 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.

## Key Responsibilities

- 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. Salary Range: $220,000–$275,000 per year 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 of Osmo’s total rewards approach, which is designed to support the well-being, growth, and long-term success of our team members. Depending on the role, this may include base salary or contract-based pay, along with access to health, dental, and vision coverage; a 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match; flexible paid time off and company holidays; and equity or incentive compensation for eligible roles. Actual compensation will vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location, internal equity, and other relevant business considerations. Osmo regularly reviews pay ranges and compensation structures to ensure they remain competitive, equitable, and aligned with current market data. All employment decisions and responsibilities are determined based on current ability and your ability to grow, without regard to race, color, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, marital status, physical, mental, or sensory disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Osmo does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Osmo or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by the Osmo Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Osmo and Osmo will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire

## About Osmo

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Osmo digitizes the sense of smell using AI and machine learning to design and analyze fragrances for human health and happiness.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B; raised $70M in 2026)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Alex Wiltschko (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Olfactory intelligence, fragrance development, AI-powered scent technology.
- **Target customers**: Global CPG companies, independent fragrance brands, and product developers (B2B).
- **Mission**: “Digitizing the sense of smell, for human health and happiness.”

## Products & Services
- **Olfactory Intelligence (OI) Platform**: An AI system that can read, write, map, and digitize scent. Uses molecular data and machine learning to predict odor perception and design novel fragrance ingredients. (SaaS / AI platform)
- **Scent Teleportation**: A process that captures and digitizes the scent of a real object (e.g., a plum) and recreates it as an identical fragrance – demonstrated in 2024. (Technology / service)
- **AI-Powered Fragrance House**: Launched in 2025, the world’s first fully AI-driven fragrance house, giving independent and growing brands access to advanced fragrance development once reserved for large conglomerates. (Service / product)
- **Fragrance Ingredient Discovery**: Patented new fragrance ingredients; in March 2025 Osmo filed more patents for new fragrance ingredients than the rest of the industry combined. (R&D / IP)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $133.5M (Series A $60M + Series B $70M, per CB Insights).
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Lux Capital, GV, The Alexa Fund; research partnership with the Gates Foundation; board includes Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize in Physics, “Godfather of Deep Learning”).
- **Growth Signals**: Grew to >100 employees; built a 58,000 sq ft manufacturing and R&D facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey; launched first AI-powered fragrance house; filed industry-leading patent volumes; Scent Teleportation proof-of-concept.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary Olfactory Intelligence platform** that can predict scent from molecular structure (validated in a 2023 *Science* paper).
- **World-class perfumery team** including master perfumers (Christophe Laudamiel, Thomas Fachon, Zerlina Dubois) combined with AI/ML expertise.
- **Patent moat**: In 2025, Osmo filed more patents for new fragrance ingredients than the rest of the industry combined.
- **Exclusive access to computational olfactory models** from years of research at Google Brain.

## Strategic Focus
- Scale AI-driven fragrance creation for CPG partners and independent brands.
- Continue expanding the Olfactory Intelligence platform for health and wellness applications (e.g., Gates Foundation partnership for ingredient discovery).
- Digitize additional scents and move toward full scent teleportation and digital scent transmission.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include “Kindness as a strength”; team of neuroscientists, master perfumers, and engineers committed to diversity of thought. Hires are described as people who “raise the standard for everyone around them.”
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/on-site roles; manufacturing and R&D facilities in Elizabeth, NJ, plus a New York City headquarters. Open positions listed as full-time, part-time, and “Technical Evaluation” tracks.
- **Notable perks / engineering culture**: Work on frontier AI/ML technology applied to a new sensory domain; collaborate with Nobel laureates (Geoffrey Hinton on board); opportunities to shape the future of digital olfaction.
- **Open roles** (as of mid-2026): Software, Manufacturing, Analytical Chemistry, IT, Marketing, Commercial Sales, People Operations, Lab Operations, and more. Expanding quickly.

## Sources
1. [osmo.ai/about](https://www.osmo.ai/about)
2. [osmo.ai/](https://www.osmo.ai/)
3. [careers - osmo.ai](https://www.osmo.ai/careers)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/osmo](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/osmo)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/osmo-1](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/osmo-1)

## Other roles at Osmo

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- [FP&A Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/fp-a-lead-osmo-elizabeth-zxsjxrnsry8q) — Elizabeth, NJ
- [Applications Lab Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/applications-lab-associate-osmo-elizabeth-b1qbcxv5dyxt) — Elizabeth, NJ
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