Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

About the Role

You'll build the software backbone that powers autonomous manufacturing operations at Tenkara. As a Senior/Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you'll design scalable backend services, data pipelines, and integrations that coordinate AI-powered agents and high-stakes transactions across complex supply chain workflows. This role is critical to reliably moving physical goods through manufacturing systems.

What You'll Do

• Design and scale backend services using Next.js API routes, background jobs, and serverless functions to handle high-throughput order processing.
• Build and productionize LLM-based agents, AI/ML infrastructure, and RAG patterns for intelligent quote analysis and supplier recommendations.
• Own the data layer by designing PostgreSQL schemas, migrations, and complex queries for materials, quotes, orders, and supplier relationships.
• Architect event-driven systems with reliable pipelines for order state management, notification triggers, and cross-system synchronization.
• Implement caching and rate limiting strategies to ensure reliable external API calls at scale.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability patterns while owning incident response for backend systems.

What We're Looking For

• Experience designing and implementing reliable data processing with transactional guarantees (ACID semantics, exactly-once processing) and idempotent APIs.
• Background with NLP/ML pipelines for extracting data from unstructured supplier documents and emails, including OCR and information extraction.
• Domain knowledge of manufacturing supply chain, procurement, and logistics workflows.
• Strong computer science fundamentals.
• Experience integrating with ERP systems (SAP, Oracle) and freight/carrier APIs, including legacy or poorly documented interfaces.
• Supply chain domain experience.