Staff Software Engineer, Backend
A Staff Software Engineer at GoMotive designs and builds scalable platform services and APIs, mentors engineers, and shapes technical direction to deliver reliable customer experiences.
- Compensation
- $180K–$200K
- Location
- Hybrid - San Francisco, California
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building production systems, platforms, or customer-facing products
- Strong experience with one or more modern programming languages such as Go, Ruby, Python, Java, Kotlin, Swift, or similar
- Proven experience designing scalable distributed systems, data models, APIs, and cloud-native services
- Strong technical judgment and problem-solving skills, including the ability to identify risks, bugs, and bottlenecks early
- Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating effectively with cross-functional stakeholders to deliver complex technical initiatives
Nice to have
- 8+ years of software engineering experience building production systems, platforms, or customer-facing products
- Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating effectively with cross-functional stakeholders to deliver complex technical initiatives
- Experience leading technical projects, designing distributed systems
Full description
Who we are:
Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.
Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.
Visit to learn more.
About the Role:
As a Software Engineer at Motive, you will design and build scalable product and platform capabilities that power mission-critical customer experiences, with meaningful ownership from architecture through production operations. In this role, you will report into an Engineering Manager, and help shape technical direction, raise engineering standards, and mentor other engineers while partnering across product and engineering teams to deliver reliable, secure, and maintainable systems.
What You’ll Do:
- Design, build, and ship scalable services, APIs, and product features with a strong emphasis on reliability, maintainability, and performance.
- Drive technical design and make sound architecture decisions for new capabilities and improvements to existing systems.
- Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver high-quality solutions that solve meaningful customer problems.
- Improve engineering excellence through code reviews, testing, monitoring, logging, debugging, and operational best practices.
- Mentor engineers and contribute to team direction by sharing knowledge, providing technical guidance, and helping scale effective engineering practices.
What We’re Looking For:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building production systems, platforms, or customer-facing products.
- Strong experience with one or more modern programming languages such as Go, Ruby, Python, Java, Kotlin, Swift, or similar.
- Proven experience designing scalable distributed systems, data models, APIs, and cloud-native services.
- Strong technical judgment and problem-solving skills, including the ability to identify risks, bugs, and bottlenecks early.
- Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating effectively with cross-functional stakeholders to deliver complex technical initiatives.