Senior Software Engineer - Backend

Motive

San Francisco, UShybrid$140k-$193k/yrPosted Jul 31, 2026
Posting intelligenceActively listedReposted 4×, possible evergreen/ghost posting

Skills

postgrescassandradynamodbgokotlinazurekafkaflinkredisjavarubygooglecloudaws

About the role

Who we are:

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.

Visit gomotive.com to learn more.

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

Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here.

UK Candidate Privacy Notice here.

The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.

All job postings are for existing vacancies. Please note; some interviews or new-hire training sessions may be held in person at one of our global offices.

Compensation

This Backend Engineer role pays $140k-$193k/yr. Within typical range for backend engineer roles in United States.

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