Staff Backend Engineer, IoT & Fleet Monitoring

Motive; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care benefits

PTO

Disability coverage

Life insurance

401k contribution

Job summary

Motive empowers teams to manage drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet spend in a single system. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Equipment Monitoring team, you’ll build backend services that ingest telemetry from IoT devices and provide real-time locations, geofence events, trips, and alerts.

You’ll collaborate with Embedded/IoT teams, design scalable APIs, and operate streaming pipelines (Kafka/Flink).

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science or related field.
• 56
• 5+ years software development experience.
• 56
• 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

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Distributed systems

Event-driven pipelines

Kafka

Flink

Kinesis

Golang

Ruby

Kotlin/Java

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

Redis

Cassandra

AWS

GCP

Azure

IoT data

Geospatial systems

Ownership mindset

Education

BS or MS in Computer Science

Tools

APIs

Job description

Motive empowers teams to manage drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet spend in a single system. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Equipment Monitoring team, you’ll build backend services that ingest telemetry from IoT devices and provide real-time locations, geofence events, trips, and alerts.

You’ll collaborate with Embedded/IoT teams, design scalable APIs, and operate streaming pipelines (Kafka/Flink).