About the RoleWe're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Ticketing & Payments team in San Carlos, CA. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role for someone who wants to make an impact on how traffic enforcement officers engage with our platform. You will play a key role in building observable and scalable systems without compromising security and reliability of the services we enable. This team collaborates with many cross functional teams - from Infrastructure to Product to Support - to deliver solutions that address evolving user needs.
What You'll Do- Scope, design, build and maintain APIs that are secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready
- Improve tenancy and isolation boundaries across our violations, citations and payments systems, with a clear point of view on where and why systems should be separated
- Partner closely with product management to turn business needs into pragmatic, well-scoped technical solutions
- Make real engineering trade-offs - build vs. buy, flexibility vs. simplicity and clearly communicate the reasoning behind them
- Operate what you build: respond to incidents, and drive toward root cause rather than just mitigation
- Model strong technical judgment and decision-making. Mentor and coach engineers to reason through trade-offs and write decisions down.
- Set and hold a high technical bar, methodically raising the quality of design and execution across the team
- Collaborate effectively in a distributed and hybrid team, maintaining open communication and strong connections
What We're Looking For- 5+ years of experience building and operating large scale production systems
- 5+ years of programming with software programming languages like Go, Ruby, Java, Python, Kotlin, or similar
- 5+ Experience designing and building scalable backend APIs or platform services
- 3+ years of real operational experience - comfortable owning a system in production, diagnosing issues under pressure, and improving reliability over time
- Strong understanding of API design best practices - security, data format and interchange, version control and CI/CD
- A track record of working directly with product management shaping solutions, not just receiving specs
- Interest in working as a generalist across tech stacks to solve problems for internal and external customers.
- A pragmatic mindset: able to tell the difference between the ideal solution and the right solution for right now
- You take ownership of your work and collaborate well with teammates. You understand what mentoring looks like and extend that to early in career engineers
Bonus Points- Knowledge building distributed systems
- Experience working in platform teams that build and maintain foundational services for product engineers by teams
Why Obvio- Your work will help save lives and improve road safety
- Series A of $22M led by Bain Capital
- Fast-moving startup environment with meaningful ownership
- Competitive compensation and early-stage equity
