Staff Platform Engineer

Remote; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly environment

Job summary

Catena Clearing is seeking a senior platform engineer to own the core infrastructure powering its universal telematics data platform. You will lead cloud architecture, ingestion pipelines, and developer tooling, ensuring sub-second API responses, fault tolerance, and near-100% uptime as data grows.

You will guide architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product teams to rapidly add ELD and telematics integrations while maintaining security and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, with 2+ years in staff/principal leadership.
• Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
• Proven Docker, multi-region AWS, and IaC expertise (CDK, Terraform, or Pulumi).
• Experience with distributed datastores, message brokers, caching, and time-series DBs.

Responsibilities

• Lead long-term technical strategy and architectural roadmap for Catena's infrastructure.
• Architect and scale distributed event-streaming systems (e.g., Kinesis, Kafka).
• Design API gateways and microservice patterns for rapid EL D and telematics integrations.
• Own cloud footprint (AWS), container orchestration, and IaC to maximise resilience and efficiency.
• Drive observability, telemetry, alerting, and runbooks to minimize MTTR.
• Mentor engineers and conduct architectural reviews (RFCs).

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

Python

Leadership

APIs

Tools

Docker

AWS

Kubernetes

AWS CDK

Terraform

Pulumi

PostgreSQL

Kinesis

Kafka

Job description

About Catena

Catena is the universal API for fleet telematics data. We give insurers, factors, TMS providers, brokers, fintechs, and freight-tech platforms a single integration to access carrier vehicle data across every major ELD and telematics provider, replacing dozens of one-off connections. Carriers opt in through a quick, permissioned flow, and our customers immediately get standardized, real-time data on a clean, normalized layer.

About the Role

At Catena Clearing, you will own the core infrastructure powering our universal telematics data platform. Catena ingests, normalizes, and delivers high-frequency GPS, sensor, and HOS data from millions of vehicles across hundreds of distinct ELD integrations in real time. In this role, you will lead the technical vision for our cloud infrastructure, distributed event pipelines, and developer tooling—ensuring our platform maintains sub-second API response times, fault tolerance, and 99.99% uptime as our data volume explodes.

Responsibilities

• Core Platform Architecture: Lead the long-term technical strategy and architectural roadmap for Catena's high-throughput infrastructure, setting system design standards that balance scale, security, and velocity.

• High-Volume Ingestion & Streaming: Architect and scale distributed event-streaming systems (e.g., Kinesis, Kafka) capable of processing millions of concurrent telemetry pings, location updates, and webhook deliveries without data drop-off.

• Integration Frameworks: Design standardized abstractions, API gateways, and microservice patterns that empower product teams to rapidly build, test, and deploy new ELD and telematics integrations.

• Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Operations: Own our cloud footprint (AWS), container orchestration, and IaC (AWS CDK) to maximize resilience, dynamic scaling, and cloud spend efficiency.

• Observability & Reliability Engineering: Drive company-wide telemetry, distributed tracing, alerting, operational runbooks, and incident management protocols (SLIs/SLOs) to minimize MTTR across all critical data processing paths.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Champion engineering excellence through architectural reviews (RFCs), establish production standards, and actively mentor senior and mid-level engineers across the platform organization.

Qualifications & Tech Stack

• Experience: 8+ years of software, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, with 2+ years operating in a Staff-level or principal technical leadership capacity.

• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep experience designing, building, and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency distributed event systems handling massive real-time streaming data.

• Container & Cloud Mastery: Proven expertise with Docker, multi-region cloud deployment architectures (AWS), and IaC tools like the AWS CDK, Terraform or Pulumi.

• Data Systems Infrastructure: Deep familiarity with distributed datastores, message brokers, caching mechanisms, and time-series databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Kinesis, SQS, Amazon Data Firehose, Timestream, Kafka, Redis).

• API & Systems Programming: High proficiency in modern backend and systems languages (especially Python) with strong instincts for building robust API gateways and webhook delivery engines.

• Domain Context (Preferred): Prior experience scaling infrastructure at an API-first startup, developer platform, IoT connectivity provider, or real-time event-driven company.

Preferred

• Experience in telematics, IoT, logistics, fintech, or insurance data: anywhere the data has physical-world ground truth and someone makes a money decision on it

• Time-series or geospatial data at scale: geofencing, map matching, trip and stop inference, H3 or similar indexing

• Multi-tenant delivery patterns: Per-tenant credential isolation, consent-scoped access (OAuth)

• Experience building against many third-party APIs at once, where you control neither the schema nor the uptime

• Working in a SOC 2 environment, or helping get a company there

Why Catena, Why Now

• Early-stage startup: high ownership, real impact, and a seat at the table

• Work directly with leadership and have your voice heard on product and API direction

• Be the technical authority customers rely on, and help build the Sales Engineering function from the ground up

• Remote-friendly environment

Catena has raised $8.25M from Shaper Capital, Floating Point, Plug and Play, Liquid 2, and leading industry angels. Customers are already using us in production including modern TMS platforms (Mastery, Optym), large brokerages, and mid-to-large direct carriers operating 100–1,000+ trucks. Many of them are also investors.

Compensation: Competitive salary, full benefits, equity and 401k match.

US only, no sponsorship available. Occasional travel for team and customer on-sites.