Staff Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure

Zūm is revolutionizing mass mobility with its Connected Mobility Experience (Zūm CMX™) system that connects and coordinates people, vehicles, and operations in real time. In the $50 billion student mobility market – the largest segment of the mass mobility industry – Zūm CMX  is transforming a daily source of anxiety and disruption into a reliable, transparent, and efficient mobility experience for students and families. Today, more than 6,500 schools rely on Zūm CMX. Recognized globally for its innovative approach and operational execution, Zūm has been named to Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies, CNBC Disruptor 50 and Changemakers, the World Economic Forum, and the Financial Times’ Fastest Growing Companies lists. Zūm is backed by leading investors including Sequoia Capital, GIC, TPG, and Softbank.

This role is based at the Company’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA and requires you to be onsite 3x/week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday). We will only consider candidates already based in the Bay Area.

Who You Are:

• You care as much about how software gets built as what it does, and you measure a platform by the features it enables.
• You want to build scalable infrastructure and technologies that enable Zūm products to grow and adapt at the pace today's AI makes possible.
• You lead through execution and influence through adoption of the platforms you build.
• When someone asks for "the best" solution, you map out the tradeoffs, present real options, and commit to a recommendation.
• You start simple, add complexity only when the data proves you need it, and lean on experience when measuring isn't worth the cost.
• Products created on your platform are easy to maintain and a joy to build on.

What You'll Do:

• Own the architecture and roadmap for Zūm's product platform, and build it - our product engineering team uses TypeScript/Node.js, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Kafka, and gRPC.
• Stay hands-on with the product: build and review features, so foundational layers stay grounded in how they're actually used.
• Work with product teams to decide what stays in the monolith and what becomes its own service, and make that extraction process routine and low-risk when it happens.
• Make security and compliance part of the platform by design: build shared primitives for authentication and access rules to sensitive data, so product teams build on secure, policy-aligned foundations.
• Watch how the platform behaves under real production load and evolve it ahead of need: spot emerging bottlenecks (event-loop stalls, slow queries, locking, index design, partition skew, consumer lag, RPC latency, retry storms, etc.), trace them to the architectural cause, and turn recurring problems into platform improvements.
• Build the rules, automated checks, and tooling improvements that steer AI coding agents toward writing code that already fits platform patterns and conventions.
• Jump in on live platform issues, lead incident and correction-of-error reviews, and own the systemic fixes that follow.
• Act as the escalation point and thought partner for engineering leadership on platform investment and tradeoffs.

What You Bring To Zūm:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Experience designing and building authentication/authorization systems, including SSO protocols (SAML, OIDC) and authorization models (RBAC/ABAC).
• Track record of extracting services from a monolith deliberately and safely, with clear judgment about what should and shouldn't be split out.
• Comfort diagnosing performance issues at the architectural level: query plans, locking, partitioning, consumer lag, RPC latency, and similar failure modes.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and drive adoption through good defaults, not mandate.
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable holding a technical line respectfully in design reviews.
• Comfort operating with a high degree of ownership and autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Good sense of humor with a great ability to work with others.

Bonus Points:

• Passionate about working for a mission-driven company.
• Experience embedding engineering standards into AI coding agents or developer tooling (linting/agent rules, code generation harnesses, automated review checks).
• 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 working in transportation, logistics, or another operationally complex industry.