Senior Backend Software Engineer

Senior Backend Software Engineer

Seattle, Washington, United States

DAT Freight & Analytics is an award-winning employer of choice and a next-generation SaaS technology company that has been at the leading edge of freight and logistics innovation for nearly five decades. Founded in 1978, DAT operates the largest freight marketplace in North America — processing 250 million+ load posts annually and maintaining one of the largest repositories of freight market transaction data in the world. On a defined path to $1 billion in revenue, DAT deploys a suite of software solutions, machine learning models, and intelligent automation tools that help brokers, carriers, and shippers price freight accurately, source capacity, reduce risk, and operate more efficiently. With nearly 700 teammates across offices in Denver, CO; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Springfield, MO; Toronto, ON; and Bangalore, India, DAT combines the credibility of a multi-decade market leader with the drive of a company that is not done disrupting the industry it helped build.

DAT is hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the Broker Tech team building the Convoy Platform, a digital freight marketplace that connects brokers and carriers through industry-leading technology. This role is product-facing, but we're specifically looking for an infrastructure-minded engineer. You should be someone who can ship features to better understand the codebase and also raises the engineering foundation the whole org builds on. You'll be working on a team that will focus on improving our shared services, frameworks, tooling, and deploy infrastructure, not just our product.

What You'll Do

• Drive Technical Delivery: Lead substantial technical initiatives from concept to production, ensuring inter-team dependencies are accounted for.
• Build on (and Improve) the Platform: Write, test, and deploy production-quality code in Node.js/TypeScript/PostgreSQL, with React/React Native for web and mobile. Find bottlenecks and improve, or rethink, our architecture when it's a bottleneck.
• Architect for Scale: Design message-driven workflows (Kafka/SQS/RabbitMQ) and distributed systems that handle the complexities of a real-time marketplace.
• Raise the Infra Bar Across the Org: Identify and drive cross-cutting improvements to shared libraries, CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, observability, and Kubernetes/Terraform infrastructure. Make other teams faster and safer, not just your own.
• Own the Lifecycle: Manage the full software lifecycle in a high-ownership, low-process environment — observability, incident response, safe rollouts, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate & Mentor: Partner with Product, Data Science, Platform, and business stakeholders to solve ambiguous problems. Mentor junior en

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of shipping impactful products.
• Backend Mastery: Strong proficiency with TypeScript and Node.js, including API design and debugging in production environments.
• Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, retries, and graceful degradation.
• Platform/Infra Sensibility: Experience building or improving the foundations other engineers rely on, such as shared libraries, frameworks, CLIs, CI/CD, or developer tooling, with attention to backward compatibility and migration paths.
• Data Expertise: Proficiency with SQL (PostgreSQL preferred) including schema design, migrations, and query performance.
• Messaging & Cloud: Hands-on experience with message queues (Kafka or RabbitMQ) and cloud-native deployments (AWS).
• Product Mindset: You prioritize user outcomes and business impact over technical novelty. You are comfortable breaking down complex, undefined problems.
• Communication: Excellent ability to advocate for technical direction and communicate progress to non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus Skills

• Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, or experience owning deploy pipelines and environment promotion.
• Orchestration & Networking: Production experience operating services on Kubernetes, and familiarity with service mesh concepts. Direct experience with Istio, or Envoy is a strong plus.
• Mobile Experience: Familiarity with React Native or app modernization.
• Modern API Patterns: GraphQL experience (schema design, performance, caching).
• Specialized Domains: Experience in logistics, fintech/payments, fraud prevention, or two-sided marketplaces.
• Developer Experience: Built local dev environments, code generators, or tooling used by other engineering teams.

Our Culture

We are a collaborative, data-driven team that values respect, work-life balance, and self-organization. We move quickly on ambiguous problems and support each other in delivering business impact. Whether you're interested in the broker or carrier side of the house, or in strengthening the platform underneath both, you'll find a team dedicated to technical excellence and user-centric solutions.

Why DAT?

DAT is an award winning employer of choice. For starters, we have a hybrid work environment, but we also know what makes a great workplace. We have a time-tested and resolute set of operating values predicated on integrity, mutual respect, open communication, and executing with excellence. These values inform our strategic vision as much as any one of our products does. We've been an employer of choice in the Portland metropolitan area for four decades, and within one year of opening our Denver office, DAT was #26 on Built In Colorado's 100 Best Places to Work In Colorado.

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, and AD&D insurance
• Parental Leave
• Flexible Vacation Time (FVT)
• An additional 10 holidays of paid time off per calendar year
• 401k matching (immediately vested)
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Short- and Long-term disability sick leave
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Health Savings Accounts
• Employee Assistance Program
• Additional programs - Employee Referral, Internal Recognition, and Wellness
• Free TriMet transit pass (Beaverton Office)
• Competitive salary and benefits package
• Work on impactful projects in a cutting-edge environment
• Collaborative and supportive team culture
• Opportunity to make a real difference in the trucking industry
• Employee Resource Groups

*This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship**

For Washington-based candidates, in compliance with the Washington State Pay Transparency Law, the salary range for this role is $155,000.00 - $211,000.00 + target bonus. DAT considers factors such as scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, education and training, core skills, internal equity, and market and business elements when extending an offer.

DAT embraces the value of a diverse workforce, and believes it is a core strength of our company that we encourage those values in every DAT employee, at every level of our organization, regardless of tenure or rank. We provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.