Backend Software Engineer (senior/staff)
Senior/staff backend engineer at SearchLabs building Terminal, a telematics platform that turns raw vehicle data from 330+ providers into clean APIs and dashboards. Day to day: design platform features, build connectors, orchestration and auth primitives, and ship TypeScript/Node.js services on AWS while working directly with customers.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Toronto, Canada
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Strong backend engineer who has shipped and owned production systems end to end
- Can be trusted with hard architecture decisions
- Thrives against messy, undocumented, uncooperative external systems and makes them reliable
- Depth in distributed systems: anticipates failures and debugs fast
- Platform builder: makes systems other teams stand on, designed to last
- Sound judgment in ambiguity: scopes before building, knows when to go deep vs ship fast experiments
- Customer-facing: comfortable in demos, implementations, and troubleshooting threads
- Strong in Node.js and TypeScript, or confident to pick it up fast
Nice to have
- Serverless and event-driven architectures (Lambda, SQS, Kafka, EventBridge)
- Orchestration and workflow engines (Step Functions, Temporal)
- JVM languages for cross-team work with the data platform
Full description
This role spans everything our customers touch: the integrations that turn raw vehicle telematics from 330+ providers into clean data, the public APIs enterprises build against, the dashboards they work in, and the ingestion platform underneath it all. It is a mix of product and backend engineering, shaping the APIs and deeper backend components our customers depend on. If you want to be three layers of abstraction from the customer, this isn't the role for you.
You'll own systems end-to-end and help shape the product, not just build it. Working closely with customers, you'll turn their problems into the right abstractions and reusable components that scale. Your judgment directly shapes how customers launch products on high-volume telematics data to benefit vehicles and fleets on the road every day.
What you'll do
- Design new features and platform capabilities, partnering with teammates and customers to expand what Terminal can do.
- Build the primitives that power our platform: connector frameworks, orchestration, monitoring, auth, testing, and more.
- Shape how we build, not just what we build: the AI-powered tooling that lets the platform increasingly improve itself.
- Add and maintain integrations across 330+ telematics providers, making messy, under-documented APIs reliable.
- Work with integration partners to shape their APIs, expand the data we can offer, and improve performance at the source.
- Work directly with customers: demos, implementations, and troubleshooting threads.
- Work day to day in TypeScript/Node.js to deploy services on AWS.
What we're looking for
- A strong backend engineer who's shipped and owned production systems end to end.
- Can be trusted with hard architecture decisions.
- Thrives against messy, undocumented, uncooperative external systems and makes them reliable anyway.
- Depth in distributed systems: you anticipate failures and can debug fast when things break.
- Platform builder: you make the systems other teams stand on, and design them to last.
- Sound judgment in ambiguity: you scope before building and know when to go deep on details VS ship fast experiments.
- Customer-facing: you want to be in the demo, the implementation call, and the hard troubleshooting thread so you can learn more about our customers.
- Strong in Node.js and TypeScript, or confident to pick it up fast.
You don't need to check every box. If you're missing some but confident you'll close the gap quickly, apply anyway.