Mid Backend Developer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

PRhobe, Inc.

Software Engineer

Cloud & Backend Design Lead | Orinda, CA | Full-time, W-2 | Mid to senior — we hire and title to fit

ABOUT PRHOBE

PRhobe is rebuilding the economics of logistics tracking. Our patented RIoT device attaches to a pallet, container or trailer, reads RFID tags on the goods around it, and reports item-level location and condition to the cloud — cutting the cost of a tracked item journey from roughly $50 to $0.50. A $1.25M NSF SBIR Phase II award will take RIoT from evaluation hardware to certified, field-deployed product, with further funded scope expected soon. The NSF funding, combined with private financing, is expected to provide sufficient capital to take us beyond commercial product launch.

THE ROLE

Every RIoT in the field reports the passive RFID tags around it. Your job is to turn that stream into a live digital twin of every serial-numbered item moving through global logistics — and then into alerts a supermarket, a car plant or a pharmaceutical distributor will pay for. You own the backend, the data model, the alerting engine, the customer-facing UI and the partner integrations.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

•  Backend cloud platform. Build and operate ingestion, device management and processing on a managed IoT cloud, then lead the evaluation and, if warranted, migration to a (hybrid) PRhobe-owned platform. Pragmatism first, then durability.

•  Digital twin data model. Maintain per-item state for serial-numbered goods associated to a RIoT at each blink — location, custody, environmental history — across journeys crossing carriers, borders and months.

•  Bandwidth economics. Cellular payload is a direct cost and a direct battery cost. Design the delta representation of tag populations with the Firmware Engineer so we send changes, not inventories.

•  Alerting and value propositions. Build the rules and analytics behind real-time inventory count and accuracy, ETA deviation, route change, partial load separation, shrinkage and spoilage risk, theft last-known-location, hazardous proximity and multi-factor delivery authentication.

•  Customer-facing UI. A clear interface for inventory count, location, environmental state (temperature, humidity, air quality), device health and journey history — supporting real customer pilots at production grade.

•  Traceability and partner integrations. Model events so one structure serves DSCSA serialization in pharma, FSMA 204 tracking events in food, item-level inventory in retail and PPAP-grade evidence in automotive. Build the APIs, ASN/EDI exchanges and audit trails that make RIoT useful to our customers and to the logistics software they already run.

WHERE YOU WILL FLEX

The device and the cloud are one system with a radio in the middle. You will design the on-air payload format jointly with the Firmware Engineer, and we would gladly redeploy a backend engineer who holds their own in embedded C onto device-side work when the schedule calls for it. If your instincts run toward data and UI, there is more than enough of both here.

WHAT YOU BRING

We are open on level — we title to fit. A smart engineer with 5-10 focused years interests us as much as a fifteen-year senior. Title and pay follow the person; the work does not change. We expect experience deploying software continuously into production.

•   AI fluency — mandatory. You use Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok or equivalent daily and have multiplied your own throughput, on the order of 10x or more rather than a marginal gain. Be ready to walk us through what you delegate, what you deliberately do not, and how you verify.

•   5+ years building and operating production backend systems, including services you personally kept running.

•   Data engineering instincts for high-volume time-series and event data, and schemas that survive years of change. PostgeSQL, MQTT/COAP.

•   Event-driven or streaming architecture; an alerting engine that is both accurate and cheap to run, supporting observability, logging and metrics.

•   Practical API design and third-party integration, including documentation partners can actually build against. REST, Websockets etc.

•   Sufficient front-end capability to own an operational dashboard end to end supporting security, authentication, authorization, multi-tenancy

•   Time-series and event data at fleet scale, with cost-aware query, retention and rollup, and with event queues.

•   Working knowledge of multi-tenant security and data isolation — our customers compete with one another.

•   BSCS or equivalent practical background.

NICE TO HAVE

•   Managed IoT platform experience (AWS IoT, Azure IoT, Google Cloud IoT or similar) — provisioning, fleet management, telemetry.

•   Logistics, WMS or track-and-trace domain experience in automotive, pharma, retail or food.

•   GS1 EPCIS, SGTIN and EPC Gen2 identifiers; DSCSA or FSMA 204 data models; Flutter or an equivalent front-end framework.

COMPENSATION, BENEFITS AND LOCATION

Full-time W-2. $113,000–$139,000 depending on level and experience, set against the labor rates approved under our federal award. 401(k) with 6% employer match; 90% employer-paid medical, dental and vision. Based in Orinda, CA, at our facility walking distance from BART; remote and hybrid arrangements within California open to discussion.

WHY THIS IS WORTH YOUR TIME

•   Generous equity, and a market that justifies it. Early-stage equity is inherently uncertain. What we can say are the targets: ~$10 trillion global logistics (tracking) and $30 trillion product inventory. Taking tracking from $50 to $0.50 while creating the real-time inventory category is a change we expect to work at a scale with no natural ceiling.

•   Ownership, and it ships. You own your discipline, and your name goes on the patents you earn. Funded, with customers waiting on pilots — your work will be deployed to customer pilots inside a year.

• PRhobe is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on any protected basis. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. This role is federally funded; daily contemporaneous time recording against project charge codes is a condition of employment.