Staff Software Engineer

Catena is building the data infrastructure layer for freight logistics. We normalize real-time telematics and execution data from 900K+ vehicles across 200+ ELD and GPS providers into a single API powering enterprise TMS platforms, brokerages, carriers, insurers, and fintechs. We normalize real-time telematics and execution data from hundreds of thousands of trucks and trailers across 200+ providers into a single API. The data is complex, the volume is high, and the platform underneath it has to stay fast and reliable as we scale. Under the hood, our platform is a fully infrastructure-as-code (AWS CDK), serverless, event-driven, service-oriented system. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to take deep ownership of it: to extend it, harden it, and set the technical direction for how it grows. This is a hands-on senior engineering role; you'll be shipping code. You'll also own the architecture of a major part of the platform and raise the bar for the engineers around you. \n What you'll do: This role is about building and extending the core services that make up our platform. Own the Ingestion Platform: you'll own the system that pulls in data from external providers and turns it into clean, normalized data. Our integrations team uses it to connect each new provider, so the platform you build directly determines how quickly and reliably we can onboard them. Build Customer-Facing APIs: you'll design and maintain the FastAPI services that deliver our data to customers, focusing on performance, clean contracts, and reliability. This also includes the outbound webhook delivery service that pushes events and updates to customers in real-time. Design Platform Security: you'll help design and maintain how we secure data and access across these services, treating security as a core part of the engineering work rather than an afterthought. Treat Reliability as the Product: API uptime and our schemas and contracts are externalities our customers plan around. You'll own the patterns that hold the line: degraded-mode handling, dead-letter-queue alerting and replay, correlation across services, and disaster recovery. Multiply the Team: you'll author patterns, shared libraries, runbooks, and docs the team will adopt, sit on the architectural review function, and partner with Product and other teams on the contracts that cross between them. Build for an AI-Native Platform: our data increasingly serves AI agents acting on behalf of customers, not just human integrators. You'll architect AI-touched surfaces for production reliability (evaluation, observability, rollback, cost controls), make build-vs-buy calls on AI capabilities, and design APIs and schemas that work well for AI consumers. Develop the Engineers Around You: you'll make other engineers measurably more effective through design review, pairing, and mentorship, help calibrate the technical bar across teams, and sell Catena to candidates at the senior end. Is this role right for you? Our ideal candidate has owned production data platforms before and cares about more than whether something works: they care that it's maintainable, observable, and built to scale. You're excited to step into an existing, sophisticated codebase and making it better. Specifically, you: Roughly 8+ years building production systems, with meaningful time owning a service or area end to end. Have expert-level proficiency in Python and SQL and a deep backend or data engineering background. Have built and operated event-driven, service-oriented architectures in production and know where they break. Are fluent with infrastructure as code (ideally CDK) and comfortable with serverless, cloud-native AWS from real operational experience. Have a track record of architectural ownership within an area and can speak to decisions you’ve made that improved performance, reliability, and/or maintainability. Have real AI fluency, both as an engineering tool and in what you build: daily use with verification discipline, plus eval, observability, and reliability patterns for the AI-touched surfaces you own. Enjoys and has a track record of developing and mentoring engineers. Can balance build vs. buy pragmatically and make sound calls when the spec isn't fully written yet. Proven success working in a fast-paced startup environment and are comfortable with high autonomy and ambiguity. Experience with logistics, supply chain, or telematics data is a genuine plus but curiosity about the domain matters more than prior exposure. Why Catena? Why now? Catena has raised $8.25M from Shaper Capital, Floating Point, Plug and Play, Liquid 2, and leading industry angels. Customers are already using us in production, many of them are also investors. The frontend surface area at Catena is growing fast; new product capabilities, new customer-facing tools, and a design system being built from scratch. The engineer who joins now will have real ownership over how our product looks and behaves, with direct access to the people making decisions about what gets built next. Compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful equity, full benefits, 401k match. Remote-first. Optional travel for team offsites and occasional on-sites. \n