Staff Backend Software Engineer, DAT
$172-223k
+ Employee Stock Purchase Plan + Target bonus
More information about location
Digital freight marketplace
Open for applications
Digital freight marketplace
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$172-223k
+ Employee Stock Purchase Plan + Target bonus
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To deliver actionable information and solutions that help customers succeed.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of experience in backend software development, including significant time as a senior or staff engineer owning complex, high‑throughput production services
- Deep Node.js/TypeScript expertise, building and operating Express (or similar) HTTP APIs at scale
- Proven experience owning Tier‑1, customer‑facing transaction systems (e.g., posting, booking, marketplace flows) with strict availability, correctness, and latency expectations
- Extensive AWS experience with production backends, ideally including EKS/Kubernetes, Lambda, MSK/Kafka, DocumentDB or MongoDB, and Secrets Manager/S3/CloudWatch, plus infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform or similar)
- Strong background in event‑driven and distributed systems using Kafka/MSK
- Expertise with document databases especially DocumentDB/MongoDB
- Hands‑on experience with zero/low‑downtime migrations
- Strong understanding of microservice and API contracts
- Fluency with observability and on‑call health, designing dashboards, APM traces, logs, and alerts; defining SLOs; and using these tools to drive down incident frequency and MTTR
- Experience establishing and raising engineering standards for a team: PR and testing guidelines (unit/contract/integration/smoke/end-to-end), deployment validation checklists, and post‑incident review practices
- Demonstrated technical leadership: leading cross‑team designs in ambiguous problem spaces, writing clear system design documents, operations runbooks, and driving alignment across Engineering, Product, and Operations
- Proven mentoring track record, especially helping mid‑level engineers grow in system design, observability, and operational excellence
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain trade‑offs and system behavior clearly to engineers, product managers, and non‑technical stakeholders
What the job involves
- As a Staff Backend Software Engineer, you will be a key technical leader, responsible for the design, development, and delivery of our core backend services. You will tackle complex technical challenges, set architectural direction, and champion best practices across the engineering organization. This is a highly visible role for an expert who wants to have a major impact on our platform
- Technical Leadership: Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, high-performance backend systems and microservices using Node.js
- Best Practices: Drive the adoption of modern software development practices, including automated testing, conduct code reviews, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code
- Cloud Architecture: Architect, maintain and monitor robust, scalable and reliable services on AWS, leveraging services like EKS, MSK (Kafka), and S3
- Mentorship: Mentor other backend engineers and provide technical guidance to elevate the skill level of the entire team
- Incident Management: Lead the response and resolution for complex production incidents, perform root cause analysis, and implement preventative measures
- Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, DevOps, and front-end engineers, to deliver timely, high-quality and performing end-to-end solutions
Our take
DAT Freight & Analytics operates the largest truckload freight marketplace in North America, deploying freight-matching and analytics solutions to companies all across the freight logistics industry. At its core, the company exists to help businesses optimize their freight operations and achieve pricing power over a hyper-dynamic marketplace.
The company derives its data from the millions of freight matches powered by its platform, as well as a database of market transactions. This enables it to provide transportation brokers, carriers, industry analysts and other organizations with clear and actionable insights into market trends.
Having been a market leader for over 40 years, the company has grown from being a single bulletin board at a gas station in Oregon to seeing its technology deployed to millions of end users. DAT has been consistently focused on R&D and the expansion of its offering, including by acquisitions such as that of the freight-matching Convoy Platform.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Remote/hybrid flexibility
- 20 days PTO from day one, plus 10 paid holidays annually
- Wellness allowance
- Parental leave
- Career development paths
- Leadership training, mentorship programs, education reimbursement & industry certifications
- Performance bonuses & annual merit increases
- Immediate 401(k) matching
- Stock purchase program
- Premium health coverage, plus dental & vision
- Mental health support
- FSA/HSA options
- Life insurance
Company HQ
Denver Tech Center, Greenwood Village, CO
Leadership
Jeff Clementz
(President and CEO)Formerly CEO and President at Shift, SVP/GM of Marketplace and Partner Operations at Walmart (where they spent 6 years) and VP/MD for Australian and NZ at PayPal (where they spent 12 years).
Salary benchmarks
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