Staff Platform Engineer

About this role

ABOUT TRUCKSMARTER Trucking powers the American economy, moving 71% of the nation’s freight and representing nearly $900 billion in annual spend. Yet despite its scale, the industry still runs on fragmented systems, phone calls, emails, tribal knowledge, and manual coordination. TruckSmarter is changing that, starting with the people at the center of it all: truck drivers and small carriers. We’re a team of fewer than 25 building Dispatch, an AI-powered operating layer for freight. Think Claude Code for trucking. Dispatch helps carriers navigate a constantly changing freight market, reason through complex tradeoffs, and execute operational workflows on their behalf. The product is live, drivers are using it, and we’re now focused on making Dispatch dramatically smarter and more capable. THE ROLE We're looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to build and own the foundation that everything at TruckSmarter runs on. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role on a team of fewer than 15 engineers where you'll define and evolve core systems, drive company-wide developer velocity, and architect infrastructure that supports both our product and our growing AI workloads. You'll operate across the full infrastructure stack, from setting direction on deployment pipelines and observability frameworks to leading security and reliability strategy and mentoring engineers across the team. At our size, your decisions set long-term technical direction and have immediate, visible impact on both the product and how the team operates. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Define the architectural direction for our core platform, including application frameworks, abstractions, and the systems that every engineer at TruckSmarter depends on - Set the standard for how we build, deploy, and operate software across the engineering org - Build and maintain reliable infrastructure across AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, S3, WAF, Redshift, DMS) using IaC (CDK, Terraform) - Define and automate deployment pipelines, CI/CD, and observability frameworks - Lead security initiatives to ensure compliance, harden systems, and improve access controls - Drive incident response and postmortem culture to increase resilience and operational excellence - Mentor engineers across the team on reliability, automation, and performance — not just within platform WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 7+ years building and scaling production infrastructure, including setting architectural direction for an engineering org - Deep background in AWS (ECS, RDS, VPC, S3, IAM, WAF) and IaC (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, or similar) - Comfortable with TypeScript and Node.js or similar backend ecosystems - Proven ability to establish foundational platform decisions that serve as a basis for other engineers' development - Demonstrated ability to lead and influence across teams without relying on org structure - Experience at a fast-moving startup where you've had to balance long-term architecture with short-term velocity - Demonstrated experience in lieu of a formal degree is absolutely fine WORKING MODEL We work in-person 5 days a week at our downtown San Francisco office. We believe the best products get built when people are in the same room. Fast feedback loops, real collaboration, and a team that genuinely enjoys working together. If that's how you do your best work, you'll fit right in. WE OFFER - Full health, dental and vision coverage - Daily catered lunch provided in-office, plus dinner covered for anyone working past 6:00pm - Commuter benefits - Flexible PTO - 401k - Commuter benefits We would love to have you be a part of something special, and are excited to review your application.