Software Engineer - Backend

About Terminal

Terminal is Plaid for Telematics in commercial trucking. Companies building the next generation of insurance products, financial services and fleet software for trucking use our Universal API to access GPS data, speeding data and vehicle stats. We are a fast-growing, venture-backed startup supported by top investors including Y Combinator, Golden Ventures and Wayfinder Ventures. Our exceptionally talented team is based in Toronto, Canada.

For more info, check out our website: https://withterminal.com

Note: This role is only available to Toronto/GTA-based candidates

About the role

This role spans everything our customers touch: the integrations that turn raw vehicle telematics from 330+ providers into clean data, the public APIs enterprises build against, the dashboards they work in, and the ingestion platform underneath it all. It is a mix of product and backend engineering, shaping the APIs and deeper backend components our customers depend on. If you want to be three layers of abstraction from the customer, this isn't the role.

You'll own systems end to end and help shape the product, not just build it. Working closely with customers, you'll turn their problems into the right abstractions and reusable components that scale. Your judgment directly shapes how customers launch products on high-volume telematics data to benefit vehicles and fleets on the road every day.

What you'll do

• Design new features, APIs, and platform capabilities, partnering with teammates and customers to expand what Terminal can do.

• Build the primitives that power our platform: connector frameworks, orchestration, monitoring, auth, testing frameworks, and more.

• Shape how we build, not just what we build: the AI-powered tooling and workflows that let the platform increasingly extend and improve itself.

• Add and maintain integrations across 330+ telematics providers, making messy, under-documented APIs reliable.

• Work with integration partners to shape their APIs, expanding the data we can offer and improving performance at the source.

• Work directly with customers: demos, implementations, and troubleshooting threads.

• Work day to day in TypeScript/Node.js to deploy services on AWS.

What we're looking for

• A strong backend engineer who's shipped and owned production systems end to end, and can be trusted with hard architecture decisions.

• Thrives against messy, undocumented, uncooperative external systems and makes them reliable anyway.

• Depth in distributed systems: you anticipate failures and can debug fast when things break.

• Platform builder: you make the systems other teams stand on, and design them to last.

• Sound judgment in ambiguity: you scope before building, and know when to slow down to get it right versus ship a fast experiment.

• Customer facing: you want to be in the demo, the implementation call, and the hard troubleshooting thread so you can learn more about our customers.

• Strong in Node.js and TypeScript, or confident to pick it up fast.

You don't need to check every box. If you're missing some but confident you'll close the gap quickly, apply anyway.

Bonus points

• Serverless and event-driven architectures (Lambda, SQS, Kafka, EventBridge).

• Orchestration and workflow engines (Step Functions, Temporal).

• JVM languages, for cross-team work with the data platform.

How we work

• In person 4 days / week, downtown Toronto. We build better in a room together.

• High ownership. Everyone takes projects end to end and helps shape the product.

• Platform thinking. Our work is the foundation other teams build products on. We design capabilities that compose into features and accept complexity so others don’t have to.

• Talk to customers. Whether it's a paying customer or internal team, we talk to our customers to understand their problems before we ship solutions.

Benefits

• Strong compensation and equity

• New MacBook and equipment

• Top-tier health and dental, plus a flexible health spending account

• Personal spending account for learning, fitness, and wellness

• Four weeks paid time off plus statutory holidays

• In-person culture in a downtown Toronto office

The Interview Process

1. Intro call with the CTO (30 min)

2. Virtual system design (60 min)

3. Onsite technical loop (120 min)

4. Onsite cultural loop + final (180 min)