Staff Software Engineer, Optimal Dynamics
Site Reliability
$170-190k
+ Equity
AI for logistical planning
Job no longer available
AI for logistical planning
21-100 employees
Job no longer available
$170-190k
+ Equity
21-100 employees
Company mission
To automate and optimize the logistics industry through High-Dimensional Artificial Intelligence.
Role
Who you are
- Experienced:‑ Individual contributor who has led reliability programs at a meaningful scale and owned incident response standards
- Technically Grounded: Deep, hands-on experience with infrastructure at scale, cloud, containerization, and more:
- AWS (multi‑service)
- ECS and/or Kubernetes containerization workloads
- CICD & IaC (Terraform)
- Production Networking/Fundamentals
- Python Proficient: You can read/review service code and land operational improvements
- Data Driven: In your approach to SLOs, capacity, performance, and cost efficiency with strong observability chops
- Influential: Able to shape direction and create simple, durable standards
- Communicative: Excels in both technical and interpersonal communication, with strong written and verbal skills
Desirable
- Aware of FinOps (cost attribution, efficient scaling) and DR/BCP program experience
- Familiar with secure SDLC, threat modeling, and compliance automation in a SOC 2 context
- Experience collaborating with Data Science/ML teams and batch/streaming workloads
- Exposure to monorepo frameworks such as (bazel, buck, etc.)
What the job involves
- We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability to lead reliability across our production platform
- As a Staff‑level Individual contributor, you will drive strategy and hands‑on execution across incident response, SLO/SLI programs, and production readiness, directly owning highly available services in AWS; all while partnering with Platform/Infra to build paved‑road tooling in our monorepo
- This is a full‑time, remote‑friendly role open to candidates across the United States. For those who prefer an in‑office experience, our HQ in New York City offers a collaborative environment
- Reliability (≈50%)
- Own the company‑wide incident lifecycle: standards for detection, escalation, incident command, customer comms, and high‑quality postmortems with action tracking
- Define and drive SLIs/SLOs for core services; build guardrails and dashboards that make reliability visible and actionable
- Lead production readiness reviews, capacity/performance planning, load testing, disaster recovery exercises, and resilience engineering (failure testing/chaos where appropriate)
- Level‑up on‑call: right‑sizing rotations, paging hygiene, runbooks, auto‑remediation, and continuous improvement of MTTA/MTTR
- Security (≈30%)
- Embed security into the delivery pipeline: dependency and image scanning, least‑privilege/IAM baselines, secrets management, and service‑to‑service auth
- Partner with Engineering leadership to maintain SOC 2‑aligned controls as code; make audit‑friendly evidence generation part of everyday engineering
- Drive secure‑by‑default patterns in the platform (e.g., network posture, data protection, runtime policies) without slowing down developers
- Platform & DevEx (≈20%)
- Build and evolve paved roads for deploys, config, and runtime operations in our monorepo (Bazel) and CI/CD (AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild)
- Partner with product teams to make the “secure, reliable default” the easiest path—templates, tooling, libraries, and automation
- Improve observability end‑to‑end (traces, logs, metrics, alerts)
- Our tech stack includes:
- Backend & AI: Python 3 and Java
- Frontend: JavaScript/TypeScript for our web-based SPA
- Data Stack: Trino, Dagster, dbt, DuckDB, and Preset
- IaC: Terraform and Spacelift
- Cloud: AWS (ECS/RDS/S3/etc)
- CI/CD: Bazel, Github, AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild
- We follow modern development best practices with all code stored on GitHub. Every pull request undergoes thorough code reviews, is fully unit tested, and deployed through our CI/CD pipeline for continuous quality assurance
Our take
Market volatility and overburdening are continual problems in the freight industry. Now that the boom in eCommerce has home-deliveries on the rise, costly and inefficient ‘last-mile’ journeys are increasing too. So, Optimal Dynamics has stepped in, looking to revolutionize freight through high-dimensional artificial intelligence.
CORE.ai, Optimal Dynamics' proprietary software-as-service product, helps shippers optimize logistics using flexible, open API protocol to create probabilistic profit-maximizing strategies. This software gives them a material competitive edge in this respect, as it tackles the kind of growing uncertainty and complexity the industry is grappling with.
With record growth, doubled revenue and customers, and a $40M Series C behind it, Optimal Dynamics sure is hitting its stride. This funding sets the company up to expand its platform and grow its team even further, putting Optimal Dynamics in a strong position to shape the future of the logistics industry.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
1% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
May 2025
$33.3m
LATE VC
Apr 2022
$33m
SERIES B
Total funding: $88.7m
Company benefits
- FLexible Work Environment: We believe the office is a tool for meetings and connections, not a requirement to get work done.
- Paid Time Off: We understand the importance of nurturing life outside of the workplace, which is why we offer all full-time employees 10 paid holidays & unlimited time off to recharge and refresh.
- Paid Parental Leave: All parents, including those adopting or fostering children, are eligible to take up to 12 weeks of paid parental time off for the primary caregiver and up to 4 weeks for the secondary caregiver.
- Extensive Health Coverage: Our Employee Assistance Program supports employees through personal and/or work-related problems that may impact their job performance, health, mental and emotional well-being.
- Health & Wellness: We care about our employees' overall health and wellbeing. As part of Optimal Dynamic’s Wellness Program, we offer all employees a fitness membership reimbursement of up to $125/month.
- Flexible Spending Account: Use pre-tax dollars to pay for out-of-pocket healthcare or dependent care expenses.
- Commuter Benefits: For commuter expenses, use pre-tax dollars that are deducted directly from your paycheck, so you can commute with a little less effort.
- Learn from the Best: Whether you’re a UI developer, machine learning engineer, or decision scientist, we give periodic courses on advanced decision analytics, the next level of AI, taught by world leading AI visionary, Warren Powell.
Company HQ
NoMad, New York, NY
Leadership
Daniel Powell
(Co-Founder & CEO)After studying at Elon University and interning at Merrill Lynch and Princeton, Daniel co-founded Optimal Dynamics in August 2014. Since then, he has served as CEO full-time.
Warren Powell
(Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer)Previously, Warren was a Professor and Director at Princeton University for 39 years.
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