Staff / Principal Software Engineer
AI, Data & Logistics
Interested in this role? Contact us at careers@getoptimus.ai
About Optimus
Optimus is building AI software that helps freight businesses grow revenue and operate more profitably. We connect fragmented logistics data with intelligent recommendations and actionable workflows, helping people make better decisions across sales, customer relationships, freight matching, and daily operations.
Our ambition is straightforward: tell a freight sales team which prospect to contact, why the opportunity matters, and what to say to win the business. Help a carrier or dispatcher identify freight that fits their equipment, location, and operating economics. Turn that intelligence into useful action—and learn from the results.
That requires more than an AI interface. It requires reliable data, deep understanding of logistics, thoughtful product design, and systems customers can trust.
The Opportunity
We’re looking for a Staff or Principal Software Engineer to help build that foundation across our revenue intelligence and freight operations platforms.
You’ll be a senior individual contributor with substantial influence over architecture, product direction, and engineering practices. You’ll work directly with founders, engineers, and customers, taking consequential problems from an ambiguous starting point through implementation, deployment, and measurable results. This is a hands-on role: you’ll write production code, investigate difficult problems, and help other engineers deliver better work.
Level will reflect the scope of systems you’ve owned, your technical judgment, and your ability to increase the effectiveness of the team.
What You’ll Build
Recommendations that lead to useful action.
Develop systems for prospect discovery, customer expansion, freight matching, and operational decisions. Combine business fit, timing, service capabilities, geography, and economics to explain why an opportunity deserves attention. Deliver value quickly, including for customers who start with limited data or no integrations.
AI workflows that work reliably in production.
Build agents and assistants that research opportunities, retrieve evidence, recommend next steps, draft relevant outreach, and execute authorized actions. Own the supporting evaluation, permissions, structured outputs, failure recovery, latency, and cost.
A dependable logistics data foundation.
Ingest, normalize, and connect messy company, contact, shipment, lane, equipment, and activity data. Solve identity resolution, duplication, freshness, and provenance problems so downstream recommendations remain accurate and explainable.
Integrations that deepen customer value.
Connect transportation management systems, CRMs, freight marketplaces, communication tools, and external intelligence sources. Design for partial records, delayed events, retries, changing schemas, and inconsistent upstream systems.
Learning loops tied to customer outcomes.
Connect recommendations and actions to responses, qualified opportunities, booked freight, retention, and profitability. Distinguish missing information from negative evidence, evaluate changes rigorously, and make recommendation quality understandable to users.
Reliable platforms and a stronger engineering team.
Improve shared services, APIs, data contracts, tenant isolation, observability, and deployment practices. Make pragmatic decisions about what to reuse, modernize, or replace. Lead technical discussions, mentor engineers, and keep the team moving without unnecessary complexity.
What We’re Looking For
Demonstrated ownership at Staff or Principal scope.
You have led significant systems or initiatives across technical boundaries, made difficult architectural decisions, and remained accountable for how those decisions performed in production.
Strong product judgment.
You can translate customer problems into useful software, question assumptions, and identify the smallest meaningful release. You care about adoption and business outcomes as much as implementation quality.
Deep backend engineering experience.
You’re highly proficient in Python, Ruby, or TypeScript and comfortable working across languages. You understand API design, background processing, distributed systems, event-driven workflows, caching, and failure handling.
Strong data engineering fundamentals.
You know SQL and PostgreSQL well, including schema design, indexing, query performance, migrations, and data integrity. You have built pipelines that handle imperfect real-world data.
Practical experience with AI or data-driven products.
You have shipped LLM workflows, search, recommendations, ranking, optimization, or related systems. You understand how to evaluate quality, handle uncertainty, and investigate behavior that looks plausible but is wrong.
Production discipline.
You build with security, customer data boundaries, observability, safe releases, and recovery in mind. You can diagnose incidents and improve reliability without slowing every change to a crawl.
Clear communication and startup resourcefulness.
You explain tradeoffs plainly, work well with technical and nontechnical colleagues, and move forward when requirements are incomplete. You can change direction when customer evidence warrants it.
Our Engineering Environment
Our engineering environment includes Python, Ruby on Rails, TypeScript/Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS, with Docker, Terraform, and GitHub Actions supporting development and delivery. You don’t need prior experience with every tool; we care about depth, judgment, and your ability to learn.
Experience with freight brokerage, carrier operations, dispatch, transportation management systems, geospatial data, recommendation systems, or platform modernization would be especially valuable.
Your First Few Months
In your first few months, you’ll learn how our customers work, take ownership of a meaningful initiative, and ship improvements that make the product more useful and dependable. You’ll establish how to measure success, improve the systems around your work, and help shape the technical decisions that follow.
Why Join Optimus
You’ll join an early team with leadership experience building and exiting technology businesses. The opportunity combines substantial ownership, direct customer access, difficult engineering problems, and the ability to shape both the product and the team—with competitive salary and meaningful equity.
Ready to Build the Future of Freight?
Email us with your résumé or profile and a brief example of a system you helped build, a consequential technical decision you made, and what happened after it shipped.