Own and harden the sale write path, payments integrations, database fleet, and observability stack. Drive reliability, idempotency, transactional correctness, performance tuning on Postgres, Datadog instrumentation, caching strategy, and architectural patterns for offline-resilient multi-location POS. Partner across teams and productionize AI-agent assisted code and standards.
Senior Software Engineer - Platform Engineering
About Santé
About the Team
About the Role
In this role, you will
Your background looks something like this
Even better
Compensation
Benefits
Compensation
About Santé
Santé is the #1 operating system for local retailers.
Our platform runs the entire store — point of sale, integrated payments, eCommerce, inventory management, delivery-app integrations, marketing, bookkeeping, and AI Agents — so the owners of liquor, grocery, and convenience stores can compete like the big chains without losing what makes them local.
We're building a future where the corner liquor store has better technology than the national retailer: one place for selling to customers everywhere with AI agents that spots slow-moving inventory and creates the promotion to move it. Every feature we ship lands in real stores the same week, and the feedback loop is direct — our customers call us by name.
We move fast and ship daily. AI-assisted engineering isn't a talking point here; agents like Devin, Claude, and Codex are part of how the team works every day, and engineers who master that leverage ship multiples of what they could alone.
Platform Engineering owns the foundation everything else at Santé is built on: Observability, Architecture, and POS / Checkout.
When a customer taps a card at a card terminal, this team's code decides whether that moment is instant, correct, and durable — through processor hiccups, database stress, and real-world edge cases. When any other team ships, this team's telemetry is how we know it worked. Platform Engineering is small by design and force-multiplied by tooling: its members carry the deepest context in the company and set the technical standards every other team builds on.
You'll be a technical owner on the systems where correctness is non-negotiable: the sale write path, the payments integration layer, the database fleet, and the observability stack. This means working from ambiguous production signals ("this store's drawer count is off by $0.47") down to root cause, then designing the fix so the whole class of bug disappears. You'll partner with every other team — Money Movement, Merchant Experience, and Applied AI all build on your primitives — and with real store owners whose businesses run on what you ship. Beyond building, you'll establish the patterns (idempotency, transactional boundaries, caching, instrumentation) that the rest of engineering adopts.
- Own the sale write path — the transactional core that records every sale in every store — including idempotency guarantees, race-condition elimination, split-payment correctness, and graceful degradation under database stress
- Drive payments reliability end to end: card terminal terminal integrations, processor routing, preauth recovery, retries and reconciliation when the processor or the network misbehaves
- Lead our observability program on Datadog — APM, RUM, and DBM with full log/trace correlation, structured logging with PII redaction, and the monitors and DORA metrics every team runs on
- Hunt performance across a busy Postgres fleet: read-replica strategy, query-plan and index work, N+1 elimination, and caching layers (ElastiCache) that hold up on the year's biggest sales days
- Establish architectural patterns for multi-location retailers, offline-resilient POS, and high-write transactional workloads — and drive their adoption across teams
- Multiply your output with AI agents: direct, review, and productionize agent-written code as a core part of your workflow
Your background looks something like this
- 5+ years building production software, with deep experience in TypeScript/Node full-stack systems
- Real depth in PostgreSQL: you read query plans for fun, know when an index helps and when it hurts, and have operated replicas under load
- Distributed-systems instincts — idempotency keys, transactional boundaries, race conditions, and retry semantics are second nature
- Experience owning observability for a production system (Datadog, or equivalent with OpenTelemetry)
- A bias for root cause over patch, and a track record of turning one-off incidents into eliminated bug classes
- Comfort operating with high ownership in a small team where your decisions become the standard
Even better
- Payments experience: EMV terminals, processors (Datacap or similar), preauth/capture flows, or PCI-adjacent systems
- Retail or POS domain experience, especially inventory, reconciliation, or multi-location operations
- Familiarity with our stack: Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, ElastiCache, Aurora/RDS/RDS Proxy, PostgreSQL / pgvector
- Experience directing AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Devin) and building the guardrails that make them safe at scale
- History of establishing technical standards or architectural principles adopted across teams
- Experience building LLM-powered product features (we run OCR/ CV, recommendation, and agent systems in production)
Compensation
$220k – $280k + Meaningful equity
This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and scope of responsibilities. In addition to base salary, we offer meaningful early-stage equity — this team's work is the foundation the company compounds on.
- Fully company-covered medical and dental benefits.
- 401(k)
- Catered Lunches and Dinners: Santé provides dinner each evening for employees who would like to eat and connect with the team. Lunch is provided on a weekly basis
The base pay range for this role is $220,000 – $280,000 per year.
Santé (YC S23) New York, New York, USA Office
New York, NY, United States, 10001
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