Principal Software Engineer, Backend

About Our Company

Built on over four decades of pioneering research at Princeton University, our platform represents the leading edge of innovation in freight and transportation planning. We help customers unlock double-digit revenue gains and drive smarter, data-driven operations at scale.With the recent close of our Series C funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, we’re entering an exciting new phase of growth. Today, Optimal Dynamics is a high-growth company of ~70 employees, backed by top-tier investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, The Westly Group, Activate Capital, and Koch. 

We're on a mission to redefine the way logistics decisions are made—and we’re just getting started.

About Our Team

We are a team of bright, kind, and solution-oriented people focused on creating value for our customers. We can solve problems individually, but understand that the best solutions are found when the team brainstorms ideas together. We are excited about balancing the need to deploy new solutions quickly and designing solutions that are secured, reliable, maintainable, and scalable for the long run.

About the Role

Optimal Dynamics is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Backend, within our Platform Systems team who will lead the architecture and strategy of our platform infrastructure. The role spans internal tool Development, Infrastructure, and Security, ensuring that our engineering team can build, deploy, & operate systems with speed, safety, & confidence.

As an individual contributor & technical leader, you’ll define best practices, guide cross-functional initiatives, &  design systems that scale with our rapidly growing platform. You’ll partner closely across engineering & product teams, balancing reliability & velocity while mentoring others & raising the overall technical bar.

This is a full-time, remote-friendly role open to candidates across the U.S., with the option to work from our New York City headquarters. Ready to make an impact? Join us and help redefine the logistics industry!

• Platform Architecture & Evolution: Design, implement, and scale core infrastructure to ensure reliability, performance, and security.
• Developer Experience (DevEx): Build and improve tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and workflows, optimizing developer productivity and minimizing friction.
• Security & Compliance: Champion security-by-design principles, implementing controls that safeguard systems and data without slowing innovation.
• Mentorship & Influence: Serve as a technical leader across teams, coaching engineers, and driving alignment on platform strategy.
• Collaboration: Partner with product and engineering leaders, balancing speed, cost, and resilience in every decision.

• Educated: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.
• Experienced: 
• Principal-level expertise in Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
• Proven track record of scaling cloud-native systems
• Strong Python 3 expertise
• Strong AWS expertise 
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar).
• Hands-on experience with IaC tools (i.e. Terraform, CloudFormation), observability, monitoring, & incident response.
• Optimization-Driven:
• • Proven track record of improving DevEx by leveling up tooling, pipelines, & automation.
  • Experience improving monorepo developer workflows (Bazel, Buck, Pants).
• Security-Focused: 
  • Knowledge of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.) and how to operationalize them.
  • Experience leading security initiatives(i.e. hardening environments; building secure-by-default workflows)
• Leader: A history of mentoring engineers and shaping technical direction across teams.

• Experience with service mesh/container orchestration (Kubernetes, Istio, etc.).
• Background in transportation systems (TMS, ELD) or other complex, mission-critical domains.
• Experience implementing cost monitoring, forecasting, and optimization strategies to ensure infrastructure efficiency and cloud spend accountability

At Optimal Dynamics, our entire infrastructure runs on Amazon AWS, leveraging a wide range of services including DynamoDB, Aurora, SSM, and SQS to power our intelligent logistics platform.

Our tech stack includes:

• Backend & AI: Python 3 and Java
• Frontend: JavaScript/TypeScript for our web-based SPA
• Data Stack: Trino, Dagster, dbt, DuckDB, and Preset

We follow modern development best practices with all code stored on GitHub. Every pull request undergoes thorough code reviews, is fully unit tested, and deployed through our CI/CD pipeline for continuous quality assurance.