Senior Backend Engineer II (Python)

About this role

The mission of the Senior Backend Engineer is to design, build, and operate the backend services powering Super Dispatch's platform for carriers and shippers in the U.S. vehicle transportation industry. As part of an agile team, you'll own technical decisions on architecture, APIs, and infrastructure - maintaining production excellence, communicating trade-offs clearly, and mentoring engineers.

What you'll work on

Super Dispatch's backend runs vehicle shipments end to end, with much of the work happening in background and event-driven flows. You'll take on problems like:

• Architecture and refactoring - reshaping core services and data models as the product grows, and paying down tech debt without stalling delivery.
• Reliable background processing - making our task and worker pipelines safe under failure so jobs aren't dropped, lost, or double-processed.
• Resilient partner integrations - keeping outbound integrations reliable under failure, with sensible retries and idempotency.
• Endpoint and query performance - profiling and optimizing slow endpoints and database queries as data and traffic grow.

Why Super Dispatch

At Super Dispatch, we're not just changing the game - we're creating a whole new playing field in the auto transport industry. Super Dispatch is the next generation platform that is not only redefining efficiency but is also setting new standards for how vehicles are moved.

Our suite of tools, including the Carrier TMS, Shipper TMS, SuperPay, and the groundbreaking Super Loadboard, are designed with one goal in mind: making auto transport as easy as possible. Leverage the latest in industry trends, data, and user-friendly features, empowering carriers, shippers, and brokers to achieve operational excellence.

From minimizing paperwork to reducing wasted time and cutting costs, we tackle the challenges of the industry head-on, so you can focus on what you do best.

Welcome to Super Dispatch, where the future of auto transport is already a reality.

Responsibilities

The role is organized around three areas of ownership:

Individual Contributor Technical Depth

• Own multiple backend services end-to-end - architecture, REST APIs, databases.
• Design, build, and debug asynchronous and concurrent systems - task queues, background workers, and event-driven flows - including their failure modes (retries, ordering, idempotency, race conditions).
• Use AI coding assistants daily (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate design, implementation, tests, and docs - reviewing output critically for correctness and security, and helping set sensible team norms.
• Own third-party API integrations - implementation, cost control, rate-limiting, and ongoing maintenance.
• Mentor junior/mid engineers on architecture, patterns, and production readiness.
• Contribute to backend technical standards and best practices.

Operational Ownership

• Own observability tooling - dashboards, alerting, and SLA tracking for services.
• Participate in the backend on-call rotation as first responder for production incidents
• Lead the QA partnership on test strategy.
• Own subsequent post-launch support; triage customer escalations.

Product & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Translate product requirements into technical specs and own technical scope.
• Communicate architectural trade-offs (performance, cost, latency) to stakeholders.
• Collect Support feedback and iterate on API usability and documentation.
• Collaborate with Design and Frontend on API contracts and payloads.

Candidate Experience

• You have 7+ years of professional backend experience (10+ preferred), including time at a senior or staff level in a product-driven environment.
• You are proficient in Python with strong experience in Django and/or FastAPI.
• You're strong with concurrent and asynchronous Python (asyncio for in-process concurrency; Celery or similar task queues for distributed background work) and can design, implement, and (critically) debug these systems under real production conditions.
• You've worked on offline-first or unreliable-network sync, including optimistic updates, queue-and-replay, and conflict resolution.
• AI coding assistants are a daily part of your workflow (scaffolding, refactoring, exploring unfamiliar code, drafting tests and docs), and you review their output critically for correctness, security, and latency, knowing when not to reach for them and helping set sensible team norms.
• You have hands-on experience with SQL databases like PostgreSQL (schema design, query optimization).
• You've worked with at least one message broker or streaming platform (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) and understand delivery semantics (ordering, idempotency, retries).
• You reach for the right data structures and algorithms when they matter for correctness or performance, and you know when not to over-engineer.
• You have a solid understanding of system design and microservices.
• You write automated tests as a matter of course - unit, integration, and end-to-end (e.g., pytest, tox, Playwright) - and treat test strategy as part of design, not an afterthought.
• You've worked in an Agile and/or Scrum environment.
• You are comfortable with CI/CD pipelines and trunk-based development, and you're at ease shipping multiple small releases per day.
• You have experience building and maintaining REST APIs, working with WebSockets, and handling networking.
• You’ve worked with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP).
• You have hands-on observability experience (monitoring, logging, alerting) and understand SLAs and on-call readiness.
• You respond to production incidents calmly and debug systematically.
• You've led projects or mentored engineers, set technical standards, and contributed to overall team success.
• You can present technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders in business terms and document your decisions.
• You possess advanced English skills and are confident in both verbal and written communication.
• You own outcomes end-to-end, communicate proactively, and raise risks early rather than escalating late.

Plus points

• You have experience with Kubernetes and/or NoSQL databases and cloud-native patterns.
• You've had exposure to Java, Spring, or similar OOP languages.
• You've worked with LLM APIs, RAG systems, or other AI integrations.
• You have experience with advanced cost optimization for infrastructure or external APIs.

Growth Plan

Within 1 month, you’ll…

• Graduate from Super Dispatch’s company-wide new employee onboarding program. You’ll get caught up with who we are, how we work, and what we're building.
• Understand the full functionality of Super Dispatch products, as well as the greater auto transportation industry and competitive landscape.
• Learn how applications run on the cloud, how performance is measured, and how development and deployment are managed.
• Understand the main parts of the codebase, review some code, and ship your first small feature with code review.

Within 3 months, you’ll…

• Collaborate on technical projects across teams and pair on more complex problems.
• Ship a medium-sized feature and contribute to design discussions.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to tackle the interesting and challenging problems for building and growing an end-to-end (vehicle) shipping platform in the United States.

Within 6 months, you’ll…

• Own services end-to-end and lead API design reviews.
• Architect, design, document, develop, deploy, and operate Python services that serve platform users, with monitoring established.
• Be a valued member of an autonomous, cross-functional agile team with its own mission - a product manager, UX designer, a frontend engineer, and a QA engineer.

Within 12 months, you’ll…

• Drive architectural decisions and lead at least one major infrastructure improvement.
• Mentor an engineer visibly and influence the team's roadmap.
• Be a contributing member of the backend developer community of Super Dispatch affecting and improving our backend components across the company.

What We Offer

• Great Culture - We strive for transparency and you’ll work with like minded highly motivated people excited about solving complex problems
• Remote First Culture - We’re a 100% distributed team!
• Gym/Wellness Stipend - We provide a monthly stipend for gym memberships ($50/month)
• Generous Time Off Flex PTO policy so you can take the time you need, when you need it, as well as 6 weeks paid paternity leave
• Great gear - we’ll set you up for success with the right tech and help you outfit your home office, if needed.

Location Requirement

We’re especially interested in candidates located in Eastern European or Central Asian regions.

Does this sound like you? We'd love to hear from you if so.