Staff SW Engineer - IPS Session Manager

Company: IPS Group is a design, engineering and manufacturing company focused on low power wireless telecommunications and parking technologies. IPS manufactures its products in the United States of America and has been delivering world-class solutions to the telecommunications and parking industries for over 25 years. The company is best known for their patented credit card enabled, solar powered single-space parking meter and web-based management system. We build the connected smart meters, payment platforms, mobile apps and back-office software that cities and universities across North America, the UK and Ireland use to manage curbside parking. IPS is a Level 1 PCI DSS and SOC 2 Type II compliant organization, and our engineering team spans embedded firmware, cloud SaaS and mobile.

Job Description:

We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own and modernize IPS Session Manager, the back-office platform that every IPS parking meter in the field calls in to. You will be the onshore technical owner of the Session and Transaction Management (STM) stack, working alongside an offshore engineer and our QA, DevOps and embedded firmware teams.

What Session Manager does.Session Manager is responsible for all communication with IPS single-space and multi-space parking meters. Meters connect over cellular links to upload transactions, events and health data, and to receive configuration, rates and firmware. It also handles the real-time requests a parker waits on at the meter, such as card authorizations.

The technology you will work with:

• C# and .NET services, on Windows Server and on embedded Linux in the meter.
• SQL Server databases and stored procedures.
• Asynchronous, concurrent session pipelines that serve many meters at once.
• IPS's binary over-the-air (OTA) protocol for meter communication, configuration and firmware updates.
• TCP and TLS networking over cellular links.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Own the design, code quality and production health of Session Manager and its meter-side components, end to end from the meter to the database.
• Build and ship features that customers and new hardware depend on, such as new meter and payment-reader integrations, new config and data types, and protocol extensions agreed with the embedded firmware team.
• Keep the call-in and real-time payment paths fast and reliable under fleet-wide load: concurrency, back-pressure, timeouts, database contention, and safe fallback when a dependency is slow.
• Modernize the stack: move remaining services to current .NET, improve configuration management, add health checks, watchdogs and observability, and prepare the platform for cloud hosting.
• Build real automated test coverage across the protocol, serialization, session pipeline and stored procedures, using the meter simulator and harnesses, with QA.
• Work within PCI DSS controls on a system that handles payment authorization traffic, and partner with Security on reviews and remediation.
• Lead incident triage for field issues such as meters that stop calling in, upload backlogs and payment timeouts, and drive root cause to a fix.
• Mentor and direct the offshore engineer on the team, review code, and write the design docs and runbooks the next engineer will need.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Deep C# and .NET experience, including async/await, the Task Parallel Library and concurrent server design. Experience migrating services across .NET versions.
• Strong SQL Server skills: T-SQL stored procedures, indexing, locking and isolation trade-offs, and diagnosing deadlocks and contention under load.
• Hands-on network programming over TCP and TLS, including custom or binary protocols: framing, sequencing, acknowledgement and retry, and checksums.
• A track record of building systems that tolerate unreliable clients and links, with resumable transfers, idempotent writes and graceful degradation.
• Comfort on both Windows Server services and Linux, including systemd, shell scripting and SSH.
• Habits of writing automated tests, reading unfamiliar legacy code carefully, and documenting what you learn.
• Clear written communication with engineers, QA, product and customer-facing teams, including offshore colleagues across time zones.

Preferred Qualifications and Skills:

• IoT or M2M back ends for field devices on cellular networks, including firmware-over-the-air delivery.
• Payment systems experience: card authorization flows, EMV, tokenization, and working inside a PCI DSS cardholder data environment.
• Embedded Linux or close collaboration with C/C++ firmware teams on a shared device contract.
• Cloud migration of Windows and SQL Server workloads, ideally to AWS, with containers and CI/CD pipelines.
• Observability tooling such as structured logging, metrics and alerting, and log-based latency analysis.
• Static analysis and code quality tooling such as SonarQube.
• Parking, transportation, smart-city or other municipal technology.

Senior vs. Staff

Scope

Owns Session Manager features and production health

Owns the overall Session Manager architecture, from meter to database

Technical direction

Proposes designs for own work; executes the modernization roadmap

Sets the modernization and cloud roadmap; makes and documents cross-team protocol and platform decisions

Cross-team impact

Partners with QA, DevOps and firmware on delivery

Aligns firmware, payments, QA, DevOps and Security on the meter-to-cloud contract

Reliability and risk

Resolves incidents and root causes in own area

Defines SLOs, rollout and rollback standards, and the reliability backlog for the fleet

People

Mentors and reviews the offshore engineer

Grows technical depth across the team; acts as the escalation point and design reviewer

Experience

7+ years

10+ years, including prior ownership of a production platform

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or related field is preferred
• 7+ years of professional software engineering (Senior) or 10+ years (Staff), most of it building and running backend services in production.

Physical Demands, Equipment, and Machinery:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualified disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Sitting, standing, walking, lifting, and storing supplies and materials throughout the day. Performing work on a desktop computer requires manual dexterity to operate keyboards, calculators and photocopying equipment.

Work Environment:

The work environment described here is representative of those that an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualified disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Note: The above statements are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of personnel in this classification. Nothing in the job description restricts IPS Group from the right to change, assign, or reassign duties and responsibilities at any time for any reason. Furthermore, they do not establish a contract for employment as this is an "AT-Will" employer. It is the policy of IPS Group not to discriminate against any applicant for employment, or any employee because of age, color, sex, disability, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

Location.The role can be based at San Diego HQ.

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Job Type: Full-time

Salary range: $140k - $160k/yr.

Works with:An offshore Session Manager engineer, plus QA, DevOps, Embedded Firmware and Product Management.

On-call: Participates in escalation for Session Manager production incidents.

An Equal Opportunity Employer-M/F/D/V