Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

The Staff Backend Engineer role at Tread defines the technical backbone of a platform that moves the physical world. You will own the full lifecycle of the systems that move materials through the supply chain, from the models that represent projects and loads to the APIs that power dispatch and settlement. You will design and maintain the workflows and data contracts that let trucks, producers, and contractors coordinate across thousands of miles. You will collaborate closely with frontend, mobile, product, and our Forward Deployed Engineers to ensure the behavior of the system matches both customer intent and operational reality. You will define and enforce the invariants that keep financial settlements accurate even when external data is messy or delayed. You will have a direct role in shaping how AI agents understand and modify this complex domain. You will steward the reliability and performance of the platform as it scales to serve entire regions of the logistics network. You will translate ambiguous product goals into resilient backend designs that can evolve with the business.

What You'll Do

• Manage state machines that coordinate projects, orders, jobs, and loads across the platform, ensuring consistency as conditions change.
• Operate a telematics layer processing billions of rows that track thousands of trucks across North America with live position, route history, and mileage attribution.
• Design geofencing and geo-driven event processing that converts raw GPS signals into structured dispatch events.
• Build algorithmic dispatch and optimization logic, including automated load assignment that respects constraints in the real world.
• Run the payments stack that settles approximately $1 billion per month in hauler payouts, maintaining accuracy and reliability at scale.
• Ship customer-facing agentic workflows and features on our MCP and LLM tooling, integrating AI agents into core operations.
• Build integrations with telematics providers, scale houses, ERPs, and other external systems, managing asynchronous and unreliable data flows.
• Shape our internal AI tooling, including shared agent skills, automated review, and prompt and skill infrastructure, to amplify engineering productivity.

Requirements

• Bring strong Rails experience, or equivalent backend framework proficiency with the ability to ramp quickly, maintaining robust APIs in a high-throughput environment.
• Think in systems, including interfaces, schemas, invariants, and failure modes, and demonstrate a record of designs that remained sound as products scaled beyond initial assumptions.
• Model workflows where the source of truth is unreliable while ensuring the system can still settle correctly and consistently, balancing accuracy with practical constraints.
• Operate with high ownership, making decisions that balance tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and scalability in a fast-moving product environment.
• Use AI coding tools daily as a core part of your engineering practice, leveraging AI-generated code within a safety and quality framework that includes review and testing.
• Communicate clearly and collaborate effectively with product, operations, and cross-functional partners to translate business needs into technical solutions.
• Write tests and reviews that uphold quality and security standards for production software, ensuring reliability in a logistics-critical domain.
• Maintain an eye for performance and reliability, anticipating load and edge cases before they affect customers and the integrity of the supply chain.

Nice to Have

• Debug production issues and explain root causes with clarity, reducing downtime and maintaining trust with stakeholders.
• Bring background in logistics, operations, payments, or fintech domains, applying practical experience to complex, real-world constraints.

How We Work

We deploy continuously, review PRs the same day, and invest in correctness up front so on-call stays light. AI tooling is part of the infrastructure. We maintain a shared internal skills library across Claude Code and Cursor, with namespaced agent skills the whole team uses for reviewing diffs and resolving PR feedback. We engineer the agent loop itself - skills, prompts, review pipelines. We invest in the dev environment and CI work that makes coding agents useful: devcontainers, fast feedback, pre-approved permissions, cloud agent support. Improving the SDLC is first-class engineering work.

Before You Apply

This isn't the right role if you want to write only CRUD endpoints, work from fully-specified requirements, or treat AI coding tools as a side experiment.

How to Apply

Send something you've worked on where the backend had real complexity. A repo, a write-up, an architecture doc, a postmortem. One good thing beats a long resume.

Practical Details

Location: USA

Engagement: Full-time

Employment Authorization: This position is eligible for standard employment authorization in the United States.

Travel: Travel is not required for this role.