Senior Software Developer (Backend)

Cambridge Systematics, Inc. (CS) is shaping the future of transportation. We are industry leaders, transportation specialists dedicated to ensuring that transportation investments can deliver the best possible results. By providing innovative policy and planning solutions, objective analyses and technology applications, we help our clients anticipate and meet future transportation needs while improving the performance of existing infrastructure and operations. Above all, we are committed to our clients’ success in making transportation better for future generations.

Our Software team delivers technology solutions to help public transportation agencies solve complex operational and data challenges. We combine deep domain expertise in transit and mobility with modern software engineering practices to design, build, and support scalable, cloud-based applications. Our work spans real-time information systems, data integration and analytics, and tools that support planning, operations, and decision-making.

The Senior Software Developer owns the design and delivery of significant parts of our transportation software systems, from loosely-defined client requirements through to production operation. Our systems reach millions of riders through transit agency websites and apps.

This is a full-stack role with a strong backend emphasis: Java and Spring Boot services, some working knowledge of React front ends, and the data integrations that connect transit operations to the traveling public. You will be a technical decision-maker within your area, a primary reviewer for the team's code, and a direct participant in technical conversations with clients.

We expect senior engineers to bring ideas rather than wait for direction — to identify what should be built and why, not only how.

We use AI coding assistants as a normal part of how we build software, and expect senior engineers to have judgment about where they help and where they don't.

This position is fully remote and includes participation in an on-call rotation.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Design and Ownership

• Owns the design and delivery of significant features and components end to end, from loosely-defined requirements through production operation
• Decomposes large or ambiguous requirements into executable work for themselves and others
• Makes and documents technical decisions within their area, weighing scalability, maintainability, operational cost, and delivery constraints
• Proactively proposes improvements to architecture, tooling, and process rather than waiting to be assigned direction
• Builds and maintains Java and Spring Boot services and React front ends, and works comfortably across the boundary between them
• Designs and evolves REST APIs and data models that other systems, teams, and clients depend on
• Identifies technical debt and sequences remediation deliberately against delivery commitments, rather than opportunistically or not at all

Quality and Technical Standards

• Sets and upholds testing standards; ensures work arrives with meaningful unit, integration, and end-to-end coverage
• Serves as a primary code reviewer, raising the quality bar and giving feedback that measurably improves the engineer receiving it
• Partners with our QA liaison to build quality in throughout the lifecycle rather than inspecting for it at the end
• Applies and enforces application security practices: authentication and authorization, secure data handling, and dependency and vulnerability management
• Designs, tunes, and troubleshoots database performance in MySQL and PostgreSQL

Delivery and Operations

• Owns and improves CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes — currently Jenkins, with a planned move toward GitHub Actions
• Owns operational readiness for the systems they build: logging, metrics, alerting, and runbooks
• Participates in an on-call rotation and leads incident response, driving diagnosis, resolution, and follow-through
• Makes deployment and hosting decisions in AWS, balancing reliability against operating cost

Technical Leadership and Client Delivery

• Provides technical mentorship to less experienced engineers through design review, code review, and pairing
• Leads technical discovery with clients: asks the questions that expose real requirements, translates needs into implementable designs, and surfaces risk honestly and early
• Provides credible level-of-effort estimates to support budgeting, planning, and staffing
• Produces clear, concise technical documentation: designs, runbooks, and integration guides
• Evaluates new technologies and builds prototypes where they could materially improve delivery or capability

Required Skills/Experience

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems
• Deep, hands-on Java experience, including building and operating Spring Boot applications in production
• Some working knowledge with  React, along with some HTML and CSS fundamentals
• Relational database design, query optimization, and performance tuning experience with MySQL and/or PostgreSQL
• Demonstrated ability to take loosely-defined requirements and drive them to a working, supportable production system
• Experience designing and evolving REST APIs consumed by other teams or external clients
• Experience with CI/CD automation and deployment pipelines
• Working knowledge of AWS or comparable cloud hosting, including deploying and operating applications in production
• Experience writing and maintaining unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and setting testing standards for a team
• Experience using AI coding assistants as part of a normal development workflow, with judgment about where they help and where they don't
• Experience supporting production systems, including on-call participation and incident response
• Deep experience with agile software development methodologies
• Familiarity with industry-standard application security best practices
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with GTFS, GTFS-Realtime, or related transit and mobility standards
• Experience developing or supporting transportation and transit technology systems, particularly open source platforms such as OpenTripPlanner or OneBusAway
• Experience working with mapping and geospatial data in production web applications
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent)
• Hands-on experience with Jenkins and/or GitHub Actions
• Experience with messaging or real-time data processing
• Consulting experience, including direct client-facing exposure
• Familiarity with Jira and Atlassian tooling

Cambridge Systematics is an equal opportunity employer. We strive to create a culture in which every voice is valued, where employees have a sense of belonging and connection with one another and to the organization, and they feel empowered to do their best work. We are committed to providing an inclusive culture within the firm and we encourage people of all backgrounds to apply to our open positions.

If you think you have what it takes but aren’t sure you meet all the requirements of this job, we invite you to connect with us. We value all perspectives and life experiences and want to hear about yours.

EOE AA M/F/VET/DISABILITY

Salary: $145k-$175k