Founding 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

We're looking for a backend engineer to join us as an early team member. You'll play a key role in enhancing our integration framework, which supports over 100+ integrations, and in building new APIs and platform capabilities that help customers fully leverage their data.

In this role, you'll be a key contributor to our core integration platform, building the capabilities, abstractions and connectors that make it easier for customers to ingest and develop with telematics data. While primarily focused on TypeScript and Node.js development, you'll have opportunities to work with various languages and technologies as you create elegant solutions to complex integration challenges. You'll design and implement reusable components and modules that help us deliver a more reliable and scalable platform to our growing customer base.

What you will do

• Enhance our core integration framework that supports 100+ integrations.
• Scope, build, and implement new integrations to broaden the platform’s reach.
• Design and deliver new features on our data platform that add value for customers.
• Build reliable, intuitive APIs that simplify customer implementations.
• Create tooling and patterns that improve testing, observability, and platform reliability.
• Monitor and optimize integration performance, ensuring scalability as data volumes grow.
• Contribute to code reviews and share best practices to uphold high standards across the team.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues, providing technical support as needed.

The ideal candidate will have

• 4+ years of back-end development experience.
• 2+ years of experience designing and building on AWS.
• Experience with — or interest to learn — Node.js and TypeScript
• Comfort working with and building integrations for systems with limited or unclear documentation.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills, especially in distributed systems.

Nice to haves

• Experience with serverless and event-driven architectures (e.g., AWS Lambda, SQS).
• Advanced knowledge of Node.js internals and TypeScript, including comfort with generics.
• Experience building batch or streaming data pipelines at TB+ scale.

Tech stack

• Backend:
  • Node.js (TypeScript)
  • AWS serverless architecture, including:
    • Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, EventBridge, and Step Functions
  • Data streaming and lakehouse architecture, including:
    • Kafka, Flink, Spark, Java, Python, Iceberg, and S3
• Frontend:
  • Next.js (TypeScript) deployed with SST
  • Styling with Tailwind and shadcn
• Infrastructure as Code:
  • SST and AWS CDK
• CI/CD:
  • GitHub Actions

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

1. First call with CEO (30 minutes)
2. System design interview (60 minutes)
3. Technical onsite interview (120 minutes)
4. Final onsite interview (120 minutes)