Senior Software Engineer - Backend
Motive — San Francisco, United States
- Company: Motive
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Salary: $140k - $193k
- Work model: On-site
- Category: Engineering
- Experience: Senior (6+yr)
- Timezone: US timezones
- Posted: 2026-07-31
Tags: Software Engineer, full-time, Actively Hiring, Quick Responder, B2b, Company Stage
Job description
About the Role:
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Equipment Monitoring team, you will build the backend systems that give fleets unmatched visibility into the location, utilization, and health of their equipment - trailers, reefers, construction machinery, and small assets. Our data comes from IoT devices in the field: Asset Gateways, BLE environmental and door sensors, and Beacons. You will design and operate the ingestion and stream-processing pipelines (Kafka, Flink) that turn this raw sensor telemetry into accurate real-time locations, geofence events, trips, and alerts. You will collaborate closely with our Embedded/firmware and IoT teams on device payloads and end-to-end data flows, making this a great role for engineers who enjoy working near the hardware while building cloud services at scale.
What You'll Do:
- Develop highly observable, reliable, and scalable backend services that process telemetry from hundreds of thousands of IoT devices (sensors, beacons, asset gateways).
- Build and operate stream-processing pipelines (Kafka, Flink) powering geo-fencing, alerting, trip construction, and asset location.
- Design, build, and maintain scalable APIs for both internal and external applications.
- Collaborate with Embedded, IoT, and cross-functional teams on device data contracts and end-to-end feature delivery.
- Champion engineering excellence by proactively reducing technical debt and improving code quality.
- Leverage AI tools such as Cursor, CoPilot to increase productivity and code quality.
- Actively work on our AWS Cloud infrastructure, and mentor and learn from other engineers to foster a culture of continuous growth.
What We're Looking For:
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or related field
- 5+ years software development experience
- Experience building distributed systems and event-driven/stream-processing pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Kinesis or similar)
- Experience in modern programming languages. Proficiency in Ruby, Golang, Kotlin/Java is a plus.
- Experience with Relational and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, and Cassandra
- Experience building for Cloud Infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, Azure or private clouds
- Experience with IoT/sensor data or geospatial systems (geofencing, location) is a plus
- Ownership and Problem Solving mindset
- Hybrid in the office two days a week