Staff Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Motion; Portugal; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity & benefits

Remote-first / Hybrid

Growth opportunities

Impact on product & team

Award-winning team

Job summary

Motion is seeking a senior software engineer who thrives at the interface of product code and infrastructure. You will shape the per-customer environments, leverage Azure and Pulumi, and ensure reliable, secure runtimes for AI-powered APIs used by our creative platform.

You’ll work in a remote-first, hybrid-enabled team with a strong emphasis on ownership, practical abstractions, and fast delivery in a growing startup setting.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience as a software engineer, with infrastructure focus.
• Strong backend experience; TypeScript/Node.js preferred but priority is engineering judgment.
• Deep hands-on cloud experience; Azure is primary, AWS/GCP transferable.
• Fluency with infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK).
• Hands-on containers and runtimes; Docker essential; orchestration knowledge helpful.
• Experience designing reliable systems around queues, migrations, retries, and security.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve systems that provision, update, secure, and observe Motion’s environments.
• Design abstractions around queues, locks, and service bus mechanics for reliability.
• Evolve infrastructure-as-code footprint with Pulumi for reuse by engineers.
• Work with Linux systems, storage, containers, permissions, and runtime debugging.
• Collaborate in a small, high-ownership cross-functional team with weekly cycles.

Skills

6+ years software engineering

Cloud experience

Infrastructure as code

Docker

Kubernetes

Security mindset

Tools

Azure

Pulumi

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

CDK

Job description

About Motion

Motion is building the command center for creative strategists: an AI-native platform that bridges the gap between performance marketers and creative teams, so they can uncover what’s working, what’s not, and ship more winning ads across platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, and TikTok.

We're at the forefront of AI as the foundation of our product. Motion now automatically analyzes and organizes creative at scale and surfaces competitor trends. And with Runneth - the AI brain for the 100x marketer - we're going further: a persistent creative strategy agent that lives where your team already works (Slack, Notion, Google Drive, your ad data) and turns a marketer's knowledge and instincts into cross-channel playbooks, automated workflows, and a system that gets smarter over time. Our bet isn't that AI replaces great marketers. It's that the best marketers will use AI to operate at a scale that wasn't previously possible.

Today, Motion is trusted by some of the world’s top e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands and agencies (including Vuori, True Classic, The Farmer’s Dog, and HexClad) and has analyzed over $14B in media spend. When leading brands want to understand their creative performance, they turn to us.

Our founders have built successful companies before, including alongside several of the people now at Motion. A number of teammates chose to build again here — a reflection of the trust, culture, and conviction behind what we’re building.

The people building Motion are deeply embedded in where AI and our industry is heading, and obsessed with closing the gap between what's possible and what's actually shipping in product. We're a 75 person remote team backed by $65M+ in funding with a valuation that's nearly 3x'd in under two years. If you want to work on a hard problem, with people who've done it before, and a product that customers genuinely love - we'd love to connect!

Brief overview of the Motion product & Runneth from our Co-Founder & CEO, Reza Khadjavi.

The Role

Motion’s products increasingly rely on data-intensive APIs. Beyond our reporting platform, MCP server, and public endpoints, these APIs now power per-customer environments where AI systems can execute tasks, access customer-specific state, and proactively run analysis. Today, that means Azure VMs running Dockerized workloads and a growing layer of application code which needs to cover everything from functionality to routine updates.

We’re looking for a senior software engineer who loves working at the boundary between product code and infrastructure. This is not a traditional DevOps or SRE role. You’ll spend most of your time writing application code that controls infrastructure primitives: messaging queue abstractions, VM management, data lifecycle, container updates, no-downtime migrations, bootstrapping, permissions, observability, and security.

The right person is comfortable going deep into Linux, containers, networking, and all that jazz, but thinks like a product engineer: shipping reliable systems, choosing pragmatic abstractions, and making complicated runtime behavior feel routine to our customers.

Our tech stack: Node.js, TypeScript, React, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Azure, and Pulumi.

• Explore our Engineering at Motion page to learn more about our team, our work, and how we build together.


• Browse our Engineering Blog for an inside look at the decisions our team is making, the things we're learning, and what it means for us to be building an AI product today.

What you'd be doing

• Build and evolve the systems that provision, update, secure, and observe Motion’s agent environments.


• Design abstractions around queues, locks, background tasks, and service bus mechanics so product engineers can build on reliable primitives.


• Evolve our infrastructure-as-code footprint in Pulumi — defining patterns other engineers can build on.


• Work with Linux systems, mounted persistent storage, OS disks, container boundaries, permissions, logs, and runtime debugging.


• Participate in a small, high-ownership, cross-functional team with weekly cycles.

Our ideal fit brings

• 6+ years of experience as a software engineer, with meaningful time spent going deep into infrastructure.


• Strong production backend experience. TypeScript / Node.js is ideal, but we care more about strong engineering judgment and the ability to learn our stack quickly


• Deep, hands-on cloud experience. Azure is where we live, but AWS or GCP experience transfers if you are strong on the fundamentals.


• Fluency with infrastructure-as-code. We use Pulumi but any relevant experience in Terraform or CDK is good.


• Hands-on experience with containers and runtime environments. Docker is important; experience with Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, Docker Swarm, or similar orchestration systems is helpful but not required.


• Experience designing reliable systems around background jobs, queues, locks, service buses, migrations, retries, and failure recovery.


• Strong security instincts for application runtime environments.

...and you'll be a strong fit if you align with these qualities:

• You're genuinely excited about infrastructure. When something breaks, you want to understand how the system actually works, not just scale and restart it.


• A strong sense of ownership: you make decisions and move quickly to fix things quickly when they go wrong.


• A pragmatic mindset. You can ship the simple thing when speed matters, while flagging that which needs to evolve later.


• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup where requirements come with ambiguity and the “right” way isn't handed to you.


• You enjoy being a strong individual contributor and a supportive teammate. Engineering is a team sport here

What you'll love about Motion

• Competitive compensation package: We offer competitive compensation, including equity for all employees, health benefits from day one, a monthly health & lifestyle stipend to support your well-being, 20 days of PTO, and a $1,500 work-from-home stipend.


• Remote-first with hybrid flexibility: We're a remote-first company with team members spanning Canada, the U.S., and beyond, but also have office spaces in 4 main hubs (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Porto) for optional hybrid work.


• Growth that speaks for itself: Motion has strong product‑market fit, 2.5x YoY growth, second‑time founders with deep industry knowledge, and $30M in Series B funding to fuel our momentum.


• Opportunity for impact: As an early team member, your contributions will directly shape the product, team, and the future of the company. If you're excited about building, you’ll thrive here!


• Award‑winning team: We're a low-ego, high-performing team that was just ranked #19 on G2's list of Best Canadian Software Companies