Software Engineer, Backend

Who we are:

Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.

Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.

Visit gomotive.com to learn more.

About the Role:

As a Software Engineer, you will be part of the Equipment Monitoring team, turning product ideas into reality by designing the core components and services that power Motive’s equipment intelligence platform. You will build highly scalable systems that process millions of messages per day and support critical products such as real-time asset location, trip history, utilization insights, and cold-chain monitoring. Your work will enable fleets to track everything from trailers to high-value tools—even in low-connectivity environments—through technologies like BLE beacons, mesh networks, and third-party equipment integrations.

You will collaborate with a passionate, cross-functional team to deliver features that directly improve customer profitability and operational efficiency. This includes unlocking reductions in asset underutilization, expanding network coverage, minimizing downtime through predictive maintenance data, and ensuring compliance for temperature-sensitive goods. The systems you build will provide actionable, real-time insights that help customers recover stolen assets, prevent spoilage, maintain equipment health, and streamline daily operations across multiple industries.

What You’ll Do:

• Collaborate with several cross functional teams to design and document scalable solutions


• Ability to write secure, maintainable code that powers the platform that provides real time visibility into company’s assets


• Build and make scalable design choices for API interfaces to work across internal and external applications and services


• Build appropriate monitoring, logging, debugging for the health of the system.


• Actively work on our AWS cloud infrastructure


• Mentor and learn from the developers within the engineering organization

What We’re Looking For:

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or related field


• 4+ years software development experience


• An affinity for creating software that is extensible, performant, and easy to read


• Experience building product infrastructure, distributed systems and data models


• Experience in Ruby on Rails, Go Lang, Java, or similar language


• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, and Cassandra


• Experience building for Cloud Infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, Azure or private clouds

This position is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA and will require 2 days per week in our San Francisco office.

Pay Transparency
Your compensation may be based on several factors, including education, work experience, and certifications. For certain roles, total compensation may include restricted stock units. Motive offers benefits including health, pharmacy, optical and dental care benefits, paid time off, sick time off, short term and long term disability coverage, life insurance as well as 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Learn more about our benefits by visiting Motive Perks & Benefits .

United States

$140,000 - $171,000 USD

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.

Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here .

UK Candidate Privacy Notice here .

The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.

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