Senior Software Engineer, Platform

$220,000 – $280,000 Base Salary + Equity
New York City | In Office

A high-growth, venture-backed software company is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Platform to own some of the most critical infrastructure behind its commerce platform. You’ll work on systems where reliability, performance, and transactional correctness are non-negotiable, including payments, checkout, databases, and observability.

The platform handles real-world transactions for local retailers across point of sale, payments, eCommerce, inventory, and other core store operations, giving you the opportunity to build infrastructure that directly impacts businesses every day. 

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own the transactional core responsible for recording sales, with a focus on idempotency, race conditions, split payments, and correctness
• Build highly reliable payments infrastructure, including processor integrations, routing, retries, pre-authorization recovery, and reconciliation
• Lead observability across Datadog, including APM, RUM, DBM, structured logging, tracing, monitoring, and DORA metrics
• Optimize a high-volume PostgreSQL environment through query plans, indexing, read replicas, N+1 elimination, and caching
• Design architecture for high-write transactional systems, multi-location businesses, and offline-resilient checkout
• Establish engineering patterns around transactional boundaries, caching, instrumentation, and reliability
• Use modern AI coding agents to accelerate development while reviewing and productionizing agent-written code
• Partner across engineering teams to build the foundational systems other products depend on

Highlights

💳 Mission-Critical Payments – Build systems responsible for processing real-world transactions where correctness and reliability are essential

⚡ Own the Transactional Core – Solve challenging problems around idempotency, race conditions, retries, reconciliation, and distributed systems

🐘 Deep PostgreSQL Engineering – Work hands-on with query optimization, indexing, replicas, caching, and high-write workloads

📊 Own Observability – Build the Datadog infrastructure engineers rely on to understand production behavior and performance

🏗️ Architectural Ownership – Establish technical patterns and standards that other engineering teams build on

🤖 AI-First Engineering Culture – Work with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Devin as part of the development workflow

🚀 High Ownership & Impact – Work within a small platform team where your technical decisions can become company-wide standards

What They’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building production software
• Strong experience with TypeScript / Node.js and modern full-stack systems
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL, including query plans, indexing, replication, and production performance
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, particularly idempotency, transactional boundaries, race conditions, and retry semantics
• Experience owning production observability using Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or similar tooling
• Track record of diagnosing complex production issues and solving the underlying root cause
• Ability to operate with high ownership and independently drive complex engineering projects

Nice to Have

• Experience building payments infrastructure, including payment processors, EMV terminals, preauth/capture flows, or PCI-adjacent systems
• Background in POS, commerce, inventory, or reconciliation
• Experience with Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, ElastiCache, Aurora/RDS, RDS Proxy, PostgreSQL, or pgvector
• Experience building or operating high-volume transactional systems
• Familiarity with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or Devin
• Experience establishing technical standards or architectural principles across engineering teams
• Exposure to production LLM, recommendation, OCR/CV, or agent-based systems

Compensation & Benefits

• $220,000 – $280,000 base salary
• Meaningful equity package
• Fully company-covered medical and dental benefits
• 401(k)
• Catered meals
• High-impact role with significant technical ownership
• Opportunity to build foundational infrastructure inside a rapidly growing software company