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…