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Salary: USD 240,000 - 280,000 / annual
Zūm is transforming student mobility through its Connected Mobility Experience (CMX) platform, serving over 6,500 schools in the $50 billion student mobility market. The company has been recognized by Fast Company, CNBC, the World Economic Forum, and the Financial Times, and is backed by leading investors including Sequoia Capital, GIC, TPG, and SoftBank.
As Staff Software Engineer for Platform Infrastructure, you will own the architecture and roadmap for Zūm's product platform while remaining hands-on in implementation. You'll work with TypeScript/Node.js, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Kafka, and gRPC to build scalable infrastructure that enables product teams to move at the pace AI makes possible.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting and building the product platform that product engineering teams depend on
- Collaborating with product teams on service extraction decisions and making that process routine and low-risk
- Embedding security and compliance into platform design through shared primitives for authentication and access control
- Monitoring production behavior, identifying bottlenecks (query performance, locking, partition skew, RPC latency, etc.), and turning recurring problems into platform improvements
- Building tooling and automated checks that guide AI coding agents toward platform-aligned patterns
- Leading incident response and systemic fixes
- Serving as escalation point and thought partner for engineering leadership on platform investment
You care as much about how software gets built as what it does. You lead through execution and influence through adoption. You start simple, add complexity only when data justifies it, and make products built on your platform easy to maintain and a joy to build on.
The role is hybrid, requiring onsite presence 3 days per week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday) at headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA. Only candidates already based in the Bay Area will be considered.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or equivalent experience
- 8+ years of industry experience as a Software Engineer, with significant time building platforms, shared services, or core backend systems that other teams depend on
- Deep expertise in Node.js/TypeScript (or comparable backend language) and strong command of relational database design (schema modeling, indexing, query performance)
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Kafka or equivalent messaging, 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 monoliths deliberately and safely, with clear judgment about what should/shouldn't be split
- Comfort diagnosing performance issues at architectural level (query plans, locking, partitioning, consumer lag, RPC latency)
- Proven ability to set technical direction and drive adoption through good defaults, not mandate
- Excellent communication skills and comfort holding a technical line respectfully in design reviews
- High degree of ownership and autonomy in fast-moving startup environment
- Good sense of humor and ability to work well with others
BONUS:
- Passion for mission-driven companies
- Experience embedding engineering standards into AI coding agents or developer tooling
- Experience building platforms in regulated/compliance-sensitive spaces (education, healthcare, fintech)
- Experience in transportation, logistics, or operationally complex industries
