Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Location: Onsite NYC 

Type: Full-time

About Us

Join our team!  Zenda is a fast-growing, design-forward SaaS company building a workforce optimization platform for modern enterprises. Our AI powered solution transforms how large organizations manage workflows—driving productivity, efficiency, and compliance through exceptional user experience and cutting-edge engineering

The Role

This is a full-stack role with a strong backend center of gravity. Most of your time goes to designing and operating our distributed systems—microservices in Node.js/TypeScript and Python, event-driven architecture, data modeling, reliability—but you'll ship features end-to-end, including the frontend when the work calls for it. A growing share of what you build integrates LLMs (structured outputs, tool calling, monitoring, pragmatic evals), but this is not an AI-specialist role. We also work AI-first as a team: engineers here use agentic coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor daily.

You'll take on a leadership role within our growing engineering team, helping evolve and scale our platform directly—designing the core systems and building the services that expand what it can do, from real-time collaboration to the AI capabilities at the heart of our product. You'll also create the automation and tooling that lets teams ship quickly, safely, and at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Design and run scalable backend services (Node.js/TypeScript, Python/FastAPI) with event-driven patterns on Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS
• Build product features end-to-end, including ones that call LLMs — with the engineering discipline (structured outputs, monitoring, regression evals) to make them reliable
• Improve team velocity through internal tooling, CI/CD, and AI-assisted development practices
• Own complex technical projects from inception through production, balancing speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Break down ambiguous product and platform problems into clear technical solutions and drive them to completion.
• Continuously improve the developer experience across environments, tooling, and workflows
• Contribute to system reliability, observability, security, and scalability through automation and well-considered patterns
• Utilize modern development tools and AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve productivity and code quality.

Technical Leadership

• Lead critical product initiatives and drive architectural decisions
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and hands-on collaboration
• Raise the bar for engineering quality, pragmatism, and delivery

Tech Stack

• Backend: (Node.js/Typescript/Nest.js),  (Python/FastAPI)

• Infrastructure: AWS, Teraform, Kubernetes, Redis, Kafka, Postgres, Clickhouse

• Frontend: React 

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years building production backend / distributed systems
• Strong in TypeScript/Node.js and/or Python, with enough frontend fluency (React or similar) to ship a feature end-to-end without a handoff
• Experience building and operating scalable backend or full-stack systems in production.
• A track record of independently owning complex technical projects from design through launch.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and cloud-native systems
• Proficiency with Docker, Kubernetes, and major cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• Comfort integrating third-party APIs into production systems — LLM API experience is a plus, not a gate
• Genuine enthusiasm for AI-assisted development workflows
• You've shipped AI features that served real users, and you can clearly articulate how you measured quality, reliability, latency, cost, and business impact.
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to lead and execute independently
• Curious, adaptable, and eager to learn new technologies—especially in AI and platform evolution
• Clear communicator who collaborates effectively across engineering, product, and design

Why Join Us?

• Modern Stack: Work with a progressive tech stack powering real-time, collaborative software
• User-Centric Culture: Our design-first approach means building software people love to use
• Make an Impact: Contribute to product strategy and architecture in a fast-moving environment
• Grow with Us: Join a mission-driven team with opportunities to mentor, lead, and learn

If you're passionate about building scalable, event-driven systems that support seamless real-time collaboration, we want to hear from you.

Important: This role requires residency in the New York City area. We are not offering relocation assistance at this time.