Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About Our Company Built on over four decades of pioneering research at Princeton University, our platform represents the leading edge of innovation in freight and transportation planning. We help customers unlock double-digit revenue gains and drive smarter, data-driven operations at scale. With the recent close of our Series C funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, we’re entering an exciting new phase of growth. Today, Optimal Dynamics is a high-growth company of ~70 employees, backed by top-tier investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, The Westly Group, Activate Capital, and Koch. We're on a mission to redefine the way logistics decisions are made—and we’re just getting started. About Our Team We are a team of bright, kind, and solution-oriented people focused on creating value for our customers. We can solve problems individually, but understand that the best solutions are found when the team brainstorms ideas together. We are excited about balancing the need to deploy new solutions quickly and designing solutions that are secured, reliable, maintainable, and scalable for the long run. About the Role Optimal Dynamics is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend, within our Platform Systems team who will lead the architecture and strategy of our platform infrastructure. The role spans internal tool Development, Infrastructure, and Security, ensuring that our engineering team can build, deploy, operate systems with speed, safety, confidence. As an individual contributor technical leader, you’ll define best practices, guide cross-functional initiatives, design systems that scale with our rapidly growing platform. You’ll partner closely across engineering product teams, balancing reliability velocity while mentoring others raising the overall technical bar. This is a full-time, remote-friendly role open to candidates across the U.S., with the option to work from our New York City headquarters. Ready to make an impact? Join us and help redefine the logistics industry! What You’ll Do Platform Architecture Evolution : Design, implement, and scale core infrastructure to ensure reliability, performance, and security. Developer Experience (DevEx) : Build and improve tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and workflows, optimizing developer productivity and minimizing friction. Security Compliance : Champion security-by-design principles, implementing controls that safeguard systems and data without slowing innovation. Mentorship Influence: Serve as a technical leader across teams, coaching engineers, and driving alignment on platform strategy. Collaboration: Partner with product and engineering leaders, balancing speed, cost, and resilience in every decision. Who You Are Educated : Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience. Experienced : Staff-level expertise in Infrastructure Platform Engineering Proven track record of scaling cloud-native systems Strong Python 3 expertise Strong AWS expertise Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar). Hands-on experience with IaC tools (i.e. Terraform, CloudFormation), observability , monitoring , incident response . Optimization-Driven: Proven track record of improving DevEx by leveling up tooling, pipelines, automation. Experience improving monorepo developer workflows (Bazel, Buck, Pants). Security-Focused : Knowledge of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.) and how to operationalize them. Experience leading security initiatives (i.e. hardening environments; building secure-by-default workflows) Leader : A history of mentoring engineers and shaping technical direction across teams. Nice to have (Bonus Points) Experience with service mesh/container orchestration (Kubernetes, Istio, etc.). Background in transportation systems (TMS, ELD) or other complex, mission-critical domains. Experience implementing cost monitoring, forecasting, and optimization strategies to ... (truncated, view full listing at source)