About Our Company
Built on over four decades of pioneering research at Princeton University, our platform represents the leading edge of innovation in freight and transportation planning. We help customers unlock double-digit revenue gains and drive smarter, data-driven operations at scale.
With the recent close of our Series C funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, we’re entering an exciting new phase of growth. Today, Optimal Dynamics is a high-growth company of ~70 employees, backed by top-tier investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, The Westly Group, Activate Capital, and Koch.
We're on a mission to redefine the way logistics decisions are made—and we’re just getting started.
About Our Team
We are a team of bright, kind, and solution-oriented people focused on creating value for our customers. We can solve problems individually, but understand that the best solutions are found when the team brainstorms ideas together. We are excited about balancing the need to deploy new solutions quickly and designing solutions that are secured, reliable, maintainable, and scalable for the long run.
About the Role
We’re seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Product Engineering team. You will be responsible for leading a team of both Frontend and Backend Software Engineers. Your ownership will extend to significant portions of our system architecture, including designing and building scalable systems, while also influencing key product decisions.
If you are energized by hands-on work on challenging projects, changing the technical landscape of the transportation and logistics industry, while seeing your impact on the internal development team and external platform, all while growing as a leader and engineer, this could be the role for you.
What You’ll Do
- Lead and participate in technical design discussions, actively remove blockers, and continuously drive technical direction and best practices
- Iterate on our agile-inspired process, helping us build better software as a cohesive team
- Collaborate with our analytics, product, and design leadership as we define the scope of projects and plan deliverables
- Mentor engineers on your team, lead projects your team is tasked with, and influence our technical direction
- Facilitate 1-1s with engineers on your team, unblocking and providing regular feedback on goal progression, praise, areas for improvement, and career progression
- Identify areas for your team to learn and expand via project work, external learning, or additional mentorship
Who You Are
- Educated: BS in Computer Science, a related degree, or equivalent industry experience
- Experienced: You have led Engineering teams and possess in-depth, full-stack knowledge of the applications you've built from the ground up, with a minimum of 5 years of high-level technical leadership experience.
- Customer and Product Focused: You possess a deep, customer-first mindset, understanding of B2B SaaS user personas, and strategic product development addressing user needs.
- Engineer: You possess expertise in designing and developing microservices and large-scale distributed systems. Your technical skills include proficiency in Python, Docker, Kafka, and leveraging AWS services and architecture.
- Excellence Obsessed: As a mentor and technical advisor, you inspire an atmosphere of continuous improvement. You’re passionate about automated testing, code quality, and engineering best practices
- People Leader: You have hired and mentored developers and led technical conversations, fostering an environment of empowered decision-making, knowledge sharing, and process improvements
- Agile: You’ve managed a team in Agile best practices
- Communicator: You are adept at communicating and collaborating effectively with others, promoting your ideas as well as being humble when you may be wrong.
- Responsible: You thrive in environments with minimal guidance and a plethora of context. You enjoy taking full ownership of projects from conception to production
- Flexible: You know how to balance ownership and autonomy with collaboration in a remote environment. You know how to prioritize focusing your time and effort where most needed with flexibility, dedication, and curiosity
Nice To Have (Bonus Points)
- Agentic Development: Experience championing and building necessary tooling/guardrails to ensure productive use of agentic development practices.
- Domain Expertise: Transportation, logistics, or broader supply chain industry.
- Platform Development effectively integrating and leveraging advanced Machine Learning (ML) and Operations Research (OR) models, collaborating closely with Data Science teams to utilize their expertise.
About our tech stack and development practices
At Optimal Dynamics, our entire infrastructure runs on AWS, leveraging a wide range of services including DynamoDB, Aurora, SSM, and SQS to power our intelligent logistics platform.
Our tech stack includes:
- Backend & AI: Python 3 and Java
- Frontend: JavaScript/TypeScript for our web-based SPA
- Data Stack: Trino, Dagster, dbt, DuckDB, and Preset
- IaC: Terraform and Spacelift
- Cloud: AWS (ECS/RDS/S3/etc)
- CI/CD: Bazel, Github, AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild
- GenAI: Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT Codex, GitHub Copilot
We follow modern development best practices with all code stored on GitHub. Every pull request undergoes thorough code reviews, is fully unit tested, and deployed through our CI/CD pipeline for continuous quality assurance.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation, including Series C level equity
- Health / Dental / Vision 100% covered for employee and 50% for dependents
- Life Insurance, with optional supplemental insurance
- Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
- Health Spending Account (HSA)
- 401(k) with match
- Unlimited PTO (vacation, personal days, sick days, jury duty, military leave, bereavement)
- 11 Holidays
- Paid Parental Leave for all employees
- Short-term and Long-term Disability Insurances, and AD&D Insurance
- Fitness membership reimbursement
- Commuter benefits
Optimal Dynamics is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace with equal opportunity for all applicants and employees. Our goal is to recruit the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool regardless of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex (including pregnancy), age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Optimal Dynamics is committed to working with and providing access and reasonable accommodation to applicants. If you require an accommodation, please reach out to careers@optimaldynamics.com once you've begun the interview process. All requests for accommodations are treated discreetly and confidentially, as practical and permitted by law.
