Staff Software Engineer (Platform Infrastructure)

Join Zūm, a mission-driven startup, as a Staff Software Engineer (Platform Infrastructure). In this role, you will own the architecture and roadmap for Zūm's product platform, build foundational layers, and work with product teams to determine service extraction. You will also focus on security and compliance, monitor platform behavior under production load, and lead incident reviews. The position offers unlimited vacation, medical benefits, and a fun office culture.

Own the architecture and roadmap for Zūm's product platform, and build it, ensuring foundational layers are grounded in actual usage.

About Zum

Products created on your platform are easy to maintain and a joy to build on

You start simple, add complexity only when the data proves you need it, and lean on experience when measuring isn't worth the cost

Hands-on experience with the building blocks of a modern service-oriented backend: Kubernetes, Kafka or equivalent messaging systems, gRPC or similar RPC frameworks, Redis, and search/indexing systems like OpenSearch

Responsibilities

• Work with product teams to decide what stays in the monolith and what becomes its own service, making the extraction process routine and low-risk.
• Act as the escalation point and thought partner for engineering leadership on platform investment and tradeoffs, leading incident and correction-of-error reviews.
• When someone asks for "the best" solution, you map out the tradeoffs, present real options, and commit to a recommendation
• You care as much about how software gets built as what it does, and you measure a platform by the features it enables
• You lead through execution and influence through adoption of the platforms you build
• You want to build scalable infrastructure and technologies that enable Zūm products to grow and adapt at the pace today's AI makes possible

Requirements

• Good sense of humor with a great ability to work with others
• Comfort operating with a high degree of ownership and autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment
• Track record of extracting services from a monolith deliberately and safely, with clear judgment about what should and shouldn't be split out
• Deep expertise in Node.js/TypeScript (or a comparable backend language) and strong command of relational database design, including schema modeling, indexing, and query performance
• Comfort diagnosing performance issues at the architectural level: query plans, locking, partitioning, consumer lag, RPC latency, and similar failure modes
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable holding a technical line respectfully in design reviews
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of industry experience as a Software Engineer, with significant time spent building platforms, shared services, or core backend systems that other engineering teams build on
• Experience designing and building authentication/authorization systems, including SSO protocols (SAML, OIDC) and authorization models (RBAC/ABAC)
• Proven ability to set technical direction and drive adoption through good defaults, not mandate
• Passionate about working for a mission-driven company

Preferred

• Experience working in transportation, logistics, or another operationally complex industry
• Experience building platforms in a regulated or compliance-sensitive space (e.g., education, healthcare, fintech) where access control and data handling are first-class concerns
• Experience embedding engineering standards into AI coding agents or developer tooling (linting/agent rules, code generation harnesses, automated review checks)

Pay

USD 240,000 - 280,000