Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

About Terminal

Terminal builds telematics data infrastructure for the commercial fleet industry. Commercial auto insurers and fleet software companies, including industry leaders like Intact Insurance, Penske, and Progressive, depend on our platform to access GPS, speeding, and vehicle data from 330+ telematics providers. We recently raised our Series A led by Battery Ventures and are backed by Y Combinator, Golden Ventures, Penske Transportation Solutions, and Intact Private Capital. Our team works together in person in Toronto, combining early-stage speed with late-stage maturity while processing many terabytes of vehicle data every day.

For more on working at Terminal, see our careers page at withterminal.com/careers.

Note that this role is only open to Toronto/GTA-based candidates.

About the role

We're looking for an engineer who thrives on building scalable platforms and enjoys tackling hard data and backend challenges. This isn't a data engineering role: you'll design and optimize the data platform that powers Terminal's unified API, owning everything from streaming and storage to analytics, and moving terabytes of IoT and time-series data per day. It's core systems engineering, and you'll work across both data and backend to build the critical systems that drive the product's data flows end to end.

You'll partner with engineering teams and customers to build the right abstractions and reusable components that scale with our growth, help set architectural direction, and shape how the platform evolves. You know when to slow down to build the right thing versus ship a fast experiment. This is a role with real ownership, where your judgment raises the bar for the team and directly shapes how customers succeed with high-volume telematics data.

What you'll do

• Design and build the streaming pipelines (ingestion, replication, analytics, and enrichment) that feed the product and API.
• Build the storage systems that scale to petabytes of time-series data and stay fast under load.
• Work on open source technologies, contributing back when we see the opportunity.
• Make the architectural calls that keep the platform ahead of its scale.

What we're looking for

• Hands-on experience building high-scale data streaming and storage systems at terabyte scale.
• Comfortable diving into the internals of open source data systems to understand, debug, and resolve performance and correctness issues.
• Depth in distributed systems, including consistency, ordering, durability, and failure modes.
• Relevant experience with technologies similar to Flink, Kafka, and Open Table formats.

Nice to have

• Experience building software systems in Java or Scala.
• Contributed to open source technologies.

How we work

• In person 4 days/week, downtown Toronto. We build better together in a room.
• High ownership. Everyone takes projects end-to-end and helps shape the product.
• Platform thinking. Our work is the foundation that 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 an internal team, we talk to our customers to understand their problems before we ship solutions.

Tech stack

• Languages : Java (Spring Boot), Python
• Storage : AWS S3, Apache Doris, Apache Iceberg, Postgres
• Streaming and ETL : AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Spark
• IaC : Pulumi

Compensation

We hire for this role at two levels and calibrate to where you come in. All compensation is base salary plus meaningful equity.

• Senior: base $200,000 to $255,000 + equity
• Staff: base $235,000 to $295,000 + equity

Benefits

• Strong compensation and equity packages.
• Brand new MacBook and computer equipment.
• Top-tier health/dental benefits and a flexible healthcare spending account.
• Personal spending account for professional development, fitness and wellness.
• Four weeks paid time off + statutory holidays.
• In-person culture with an office located in downtown Toronto.

The interview process

• Intro call with the engineering team (30 min)
• Virtual system design (60 min)
• On-site technical loop (120 min)
• On-site culture loop + final (180 min)

Accessibility and accommodation

Terminal is committed to an accessible hiring process. If you need an accommodation at any stage — applying, interviewing, or completing an assessment — email careers@withterminal.com and we will work with you to meet your needs. Accommodations are available under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and the Ontario Human Rights Code, and requesting one will never affect how your application is considered.