Staff Backend Engineer (Rails)

About Tread

Tread is an AI-native vertical SaaS platform transforming construction materials logistics. In March 2026, they crossed $1Bn in monthly delivered load value and are growing rapidly. They are a lean Engineering organization with a small team of BE, FE, and Mobile developers.

Role

We're hiring backend engineers to manage the systems end-to-end, including data models, workflows, and APIs for dispatch, ticketing, settlements, and integrations. You'll work closely with frontend, mobile, product, and Forward Deployed Engineers, and contribute to shaping the AI tooling.

What You'll Do

• Manage state machines across projects, orders, jobs, and loads.
• Operate a telematics layer with billions of rows tracking thousands of trucks across North America.
• Design geofencing and geo-driven event processing that turns raw GPS into structured dispatch events.
• Build algorithmic dispatch and optimization, including automated load assignment.
• Run the payments stack that settles ~$1B/month in hauler payouts.
• Ship customer-facing agentic workflows on our MCP and LLM features.
• Build integrations with telematics providers, scale houses, ERPs, and other external systems.
• Shape our internal AI tooling — shared agent skills, automated review, prompt and skill infrastructure.

Requirements

• Strong Rails experience, or strong experience in a comparable backend framework and willingness to ramp fast.
• You think in systems — interfaces, schemas, invariants, failure modes — and you've shipped designs that held up as the product scaled past their original assumptions.
• You can model workflows where the source of truth is unreliable and the system still has to settle correctly.
• High ownership. Daily, opinionated use of AI coding tools.

Preferred

• Background in logistics, ops, payments, or fintech.

How We Work

• Deploy continuously, review PRs the same day, and invest in correctness up front so on-call stays light.
• AI tooling is part of the infrastructure.
• We maintain a shared internal skills library across Claude Code and Cursor, with namespaced agent skills the whole team uses for reviewing diffs and resolving PR feedback.
• We engineer the agent loop itself — skills, prompts, review pipelines.
• We invest in the dev environment and CI work that makes coding agents useful: devcontainers, fast feedback, pre-approved permissions, cloud agent support.
• Improving the SDLC is first-class engineering work.

How To Apply

Send something you've worked on where the backend had real complexity. A repo, a write-up, an architecture doc, a postmortem. One good thing beats a long resume.

Compensation Range

$180K - $220K