Senior Engineer

About Zuma

The Role

Why This Could Be Your Dream Role

• You want to work at a company where customers feel your impact every day
• You'll have autonomy to design and implement innovative technical solutions
• Your work will directly impact thousands of apartment communities and millions of renters
• You'll receive significant equity in a venture-backed company with strong traction
• As we scale, your role and influence will grow with the company

Why You Might Want to Think Twice

• This is a demanding role that will often require extended hours and deep commitment
• As a founding team member, you'll need to wear multiple hats and step outside your comfort zone
• You'll need to make thoughtful tradeoffs between innovation and immediate needs
• You'll interact directly with customers to understand their needs and occasionally travel to their offices
• We're a startup - priorities can shift rapidly as we respond to market opportunities and customer needs
• If you're not comfortable getting your hands dirty with legacy code or speaking directly with customers, this isn't the job for you

Responsibilities

• Lead critical system rewrites to transform our architecture into a highly scalable, resilient foundation
• Own the design and performance optimization of our data storage systems, ensuring they scale with customer and AI demands
• Build and evolve our deployment pipelines, enabling reliable, automated releases for AI-first products
• Set up and manage modern cloud infrastructure from scratch, leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure consistency, security, and scalability
• Establish engineering best practices, including observability, incident response processes, and system hardening for an AI-first platform
• Drive robust analytics and monitoring to track performance, reliability, and the effectiveness of our AI solutions
• Mentor engineers and elevate the team's capabilities across infrastructure, scalability, and AI product development

Your Experience Looks Like

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• 3+ years of experience building production-grade software systems, with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability
• Proven expertise in backend development with , including API design, system architecture, and cloud-based services
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar) and deploying production systems using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi)
• Hands-on experience with database design, performance tuning, and scaling high-throughput data systems
• Familiarity with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in a distributed, fast-paced environment
• Comfortable operating in early-stage, high-ownership environments with evolving requirements
• Bonus: Experience with React and TypeScript on the frontend, though this role leans backend/infrastructure
• Bonus: Exposure to LLM-based systems, AI infrastructure, or agentic AI workflows

Guiding Principles

Customer‑First Outcomes

Every commit should trace back to resident or operator value. Whether it’s a new feature, infra investment, or AI capability, if it doesn’t solve a real problem, it doesn’t ship.

Bias for Simplicity

We favor composable primitives over clever abstractions. Open standards, clean APIs, and clear contracts win over custom complexity, even if the custom version is cooler.

Quality Is a Gate, Not an After‑Thought

Quality is built-in from day one. Our definition of done includes: test coverage, performance checks, basic observability, and internal docs. Shipping fast doesn’t mean skipping craftsmanship.

Data‑Driven Choices

We use data to guide, not paralyze, our decision-making. We track leading indicators (cycle time, defect rate, NPS) and lagging signals (retention, revenue impact). We keep instrumentation lightweight but meaningful signal over spreadsheet.

Transparency & Written Culture

Good ideas don’t expire in Zoom. We operate in public inside the company, TDDs, PR reviews, and Linear tickets tell the story. This keeps us async-friendly, auditable, and aligned across time zones and functions.

Other Benefits

• Great health insurance, dental, and vision.
• Gym and workspace stipends.
• Computer and workspace enhancements.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Opportunity to play a critical role in building the foundations of the company and Engineering culture.