Staff Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure

The role

You will own the architecture and roadmap for Zūm's product platform and stay hands-on with building and reviewing features. You will work on scalable infrastructure that product teams build on, and lead incident reviews and platform fixes.

What you will do

• Own the architecture and roadmap for Zūm's product platform and build it.
• Build and review features to keep foundational layers grounded in real use.
• Decide what stays in the monolith and what becomes its own service, and make extraction low-risk.
• Build shared authentication and access-rule primitives so product teams build on secure foundations.
• Find production bottlenecks, trace them to architectural causes, and turn recurring problems into platform improvements.
• Build rules, automated checks and tooling that steer AI coding agents toward platform conventions.
• Jump in on live platform issues, lead incident and correction-of-error reviews, and own systemic fixes.
• Act as escalation point and thought partner for engineering leadership on platform investment and tradeoffs.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of industry experience as a Software Engineer, including building platforms, shared services or core backend systems.
• Deep expertise in Node.js/TypeScript (or comparable backend language) and relational database design, indexing and query performance.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Kafka or equivalent messaging, gRPC or similar RPC frameworks, Redis, and OpenSearch or similar search systems.
• Experience designing authentication and authorization systems, including SAML, OIDC, RBAC and ABAC.
• Track record of extracting services from a monolith deliberately and safely.
• Ability to diagnose performance issues at the architectural level: query plans, locking, partitioning, consumer lag, RPC latency.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and drive adoption through good defaults.
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable holding a technical line respectfully in design reviews.
• Comfort operating with high ownership and autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment.

Nice to have

• Passionate about working for a mission-driven company.
• Experience embedding engineering standards into AI coding agents or developer tooling.
• Experience building platforms in a regulated or compliance-sensitive space such as education, healthcare or fintech.
• Experience working in transportation, logistics or another operationally complex industry.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Holidays
• Wellness program
• Vacation
• Stock options
• And more

Before you apply

• Only candidates already based in the Bay Area will be considered.

About the company

Zūm builds Zūm CMX, a Connected Mobility Experience system used by more than 7,500 schools to coordinate people, vehicles and operations in real time. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, GIC, TPG and Softbank.