Senior Backend Software Engineer

DAT•Seattle, WA

16h•$155,000 - $211,000•Hybrid

About The Position

DAT is hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the Broker Tech team building the Convoy Platform, a digital freight marketplace that connects brokers and carriers through industry-leading technology. This role is product-facing, but we're specifically looking for an infrastructure-minded engineer. You should be someone who can ship features to better understand the codebase and also raises the engineering foundation the whole org builds on. You'll be working on a team that will focus on improving our shared services, frameworks, tooling, and deploy infrastructure, not just our product.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of shipping impactful products.
Strong proficiency with TypeScript and Node.js, including API design and debugging in production environments.
Deep understanding of consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, retries, and graceful degradation.
Experience building or improving the foundations other engineers rely on, such as shared libraries, frameworks, CLIs, CI/CD, or developer tooling, with attention to backward compatibility and migration paths.
Proficiency with SQL (PostgreSQL preferred) including schema design, migrations, and query performance.
Hands-on experience with message queues (Kafka or RabbitMQ) and cloud-native deployments (AWS).
You prioritize user outcomes and business impact over technical novelty. You are comfortable breaking down complex, undefined problems.
Excellent ability to advocate for technical direction and communicate progress to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, or experience owning deploy pipelines and environment promotion.
Production experience operating services on Kubernetes, and familiarity with service mesh concepts. Direct experience with Istio, or Envoy is a strong plus.
Familiarity with React Native or app modernization.
GraphQL experience (schema design, performance, caching).
Experience in logistics, fintech/payments, fraud prevention, or two-sided marketplaces.
Built local dev environments, code generators, or tooling used by other engineering teams.

Responsibilities

Drive Technical Delivery: Lead substantial technical initiatives from concept to production, ensuring inter-team dependencies are accounted for.
Build on (and Improve) the Platform: Write, test, and deploy production-quality code in Node.js/TypeScript/PostgreSQL, with React/React Native for web and mobile. Find bottlenecks and improve, or rethink, our architecture when it’s a bottleneck.
Architect for Scale: Design message-driven workflows (Kafka/SQS/RabbitMQ) and distributed systems that handle the complexities of a real-time marketplace.
Raise the Infra Bar Across the Org: Identify and drive cross-cutting improvements to shared libraries, CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, observability, and Kubernetes/Terraform infrastructure. Make other teams faster and safer, not just your own.
Own the Lifecycle: Manage the full software lifecycle in a high-ownership, low-process environment — observability, incident response, safe rollouts, and performance tuning.
Collaborate & Mentor: Partner with Product, Data Science, Platform, and business stakeholders to solve ambiguous problems. Mentor junior engineers.