Staff Software Engineer - Backend

Staff Software Engineer - Backend

Hybrid - San Francisco, California; Hybrid - Seattle

Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.

Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.

About the Role

As a Staff 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

Pay Transparency Your compensation may be based on several factors, including education, work experience, and certifications. For certain roles, total compensation may include restricted stock units. Motive offers benefits including health, pharmacy, optical and dental care benefits, paid time off, sick time off, short term and long term disability coverage, life insurance as well as 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Learn more about our benefits.

The base compensation range for this role is:

$140,000 - $193,000 USD

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.