Senior Backend Engineer

Obvio; San Carlos (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Obvio is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Ticketing & Payments team in San Carlos, CA. This hands-on, individual-contributor role builds observable, scalable APIs with strong security and reliability to support a growing platform.

You will collaborate with Infrastructure, Product, and Support to deliver solutions that meet evolving user needs. You will mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large scale production systems.
• 5+ years programming with languages such as Go, Ruby, Java, Python, Kotlin or similar.
• 5+ years designing and building scalable backend APIs or platform services.
• 3+ years operational experience in production environments.
• Strong understanding of API design best practices—security, data interchange, version control and CI/CD.
• Track record of working directly with product management to shape solutions.
• Interest in working as a generalist across tech stacks to solve internal and external problems.
• A pragmatic mindset and ownership mentality with mentoring abilities.

Responsibilities

• Scope, design, build and maintain APIs that are secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready.
• Improve tenancy and isolation boundaries across violations, citations and payments systems.
• Partner with product management to translate business needs into pragmatic technical solutions.
• Make engineering trade-offs and clearly communicate the rationale behind them.
• Operate what you build: respond to incidents and drive toward root cause.
• Mentor engineers to reason through trade-offs and document decisions.
• Set and hold a high technical bar, raising design and execution quality across the team.
• Collaborate effectively in a distributed and hybrid team with open communication.

Skills

Large-scale systems

Backend languages

API design

Production reliability

Mentoring engineers

Product collaboration

Tools

CI/CD

Job description

About Obvio AI

Each year, more than 40,000 people in the U.S. leave home and never make it back due to traffic crashes. At Obvio, we believe these deaths are preventable. We deploy solar-powered, AI-assisted cameras to enforce traffic laws where pedestrians are most vulnerable—automating enforcement in ways that traditional systems cannot. Our approach has already led to a 50% reduction in reckless driving in early partner cities.
Founded by the team behind Motive’s AI dashcam and backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Khosla Ventures, we are building the intelligence layer for safer streets globally.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Ticketing & Payments team in San Carlos, CA. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role for someone who wants to make an impact on how traffic enforcement officers engage with our platform. You will play a key role in building observable and scalable systems without compromising security and reliability of the services we enable. This team collaborates with many cross functional teams - from Infrastructure to Product to Support - to deliver solutions that address evolving user needs.

What You’ll Do

• Scope, design, build and maintain APIs that are secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready

• Improve tenancy and isolation boundaries across our violations, citations and payments systems, with a clear point of view on where and why systems should be separated

• Partner closely with product management to turn business needs into pragmatic, well-scoped technical solutions

• Make real engineering trade-offs - build vs. buy, flexibility vs. simplicity and clearly communicate the reasoning behind them

• Operate what you build: respond to incidents, and drive toward root cause rather than just mitigation

• Model strong technical judgment and decision-making. Mentor and coach engineers to reason through trade-offs and write decisions down.

• Set and hold a high technical bar, methodically raising the quality of design and execution across the team

• Collaborate effectively in a distributed and hybrid team, maintaining open communication and strong connections

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large scale production systems

• 5+ years of programming with software programming languages like Go, Ruby, Java, Python, Kotlin, or similar

• 5+ Experience designing and building scalable backend APIs or platform services

• 3+ years of real operational experience - comfortable owning a system in production, diagnosing issues under pressure, and improving reliability over time

• Strong understanding of API design best practices - security, data format and interchange, version control and CI/CD

• A track record of working directly with product management shaping solutions, not just receiving specs

• Interest in working as a generalist across tech stacks to solve problems for internal and external customers.

• A pragmatic mindset: able to tell the difference between the ideal solution and the right solution for right now

• You take ownership of your work and collaborate well with teammates. You understand what mentoring looks like and extend that to early in career engineers

Bonus Points

• Knowledge building distributed systems

• Experience working in platform teams that build and maintain foundational services for product engineers by teams

WhyObvio

• Your work will help save lives and improve road safety

• Series A of $22M led by Bain Capital

• Fast-moving startup environment with meaningful ownership

• Competitive compensation and early-stage equity

Obvio is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Obvio considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law. Obvio is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.