Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

About Terminal

Terminal builds telematics data infrastructure for the commercial fleet industry. Commercial auto insurers and fleet software companies depend on our platform to access GPS, speeding, and vehicle data from 350+ telematics providers. We recently raised our Series A led by Battery Ventures and are backed by Y Combinator, Golden Ventures, Penske Transportation Solutions, and Intact Private Capital. Our team works together in person in Toronto, combining early-stage speed with late-stage maturity while processing many terabytes of vehicle data every day.

For more on working at Terminal, see our careers page at .

This role is only open to Toronto/GTA-based candidates.

About the role

We're looking for an engineer who thrives on building scalable platforms and enjoys tackling hard data and backend challenges. This isn't a data engineering role: you'll design and optimize the data platform that powers Terminal's unified API, owning everything from streaming and storage to analytics, and moving terabytes of IoT and time-series data per day. It's core systems engineering, and you'll work across both data and backend to build the critical systems that drive the product's data flows end to end.

You'll partner with engineering teams and customers to build the right abstractions and reusable components that scale with our growth, help set architectural direction, and shape how the platform evolves. You know when to slow down to build the right thing versus ship a fast experiment. This is a role with real ownership, where your judgment raises the bar for the team and directly shapes how customers succeed with high-volume telematics data.

What you'll do

• Design and build the streaming pipelines (ingestion, replication, analytics, and enrichment) that feed the product and API.

• Build the storage systems that scale to petabytes of time-series data and stay fast under load.

• Work on open source technologies, contributing back when we see the opportunity.

• Make the architectural calls that keep the platform ahead of its scale.

What we're looking for

• Hands-on experience building high-scale data streaming and storage systems at terabyte scale.

• Comfortable diving into the internals of open source data systems to understand, debug, and resolve performance and correctness issues.

• Depth in distributed systems, including consistency, ordering, durability, and failure modes.

• Relevant experience with technologies similar to Flink, Kafka, and Open Table formats.

Nice to have

• Experience building software systems in Java or Scala.