ZipRecruiter

Log In

1

Software Engineer Contract W2 Jobs in Rochester, MI

Whisker

Senior Software Engineer

Auburn Hills, MI · On-site

$115K - $152K/yr

The Senior Software Engineer, Platform builds and operates the shared services, pipelines, and ... Designs data contracts and schemas that survive change, and partners with Data Engineering, Data ...

Whisker

Senior Software Engineer

Auburn Hills, MI

$115K - $152K/yr

The Senior Software Engineer, Platform builds and operates the shared services, pipelines, and ... Designs data contracts and schemas that survive change, and partners with Data Engineering, Data ...

Bright Mind Solutions LLC

Data Engineer

Warren, MI · On-site

$45 - $50/hr

5 Days onsite role in Warren, MI Only W2 no C2C 50/hr on w2 max Specific Responsibilities of this ... The main function of a Software Engineer is to design, develop, implement, test, and maintain ...

previous page

Showing results 41-60

All JobsSoftware Engineer Contract W2 JobsSoftware Engineer Contract W2 Jobs in Rochester, MI

Software Engineer Contract W2 information

See Rochester, MI salary details

$58.4K

$135.8K

$189.2K

How much do software engineer contract w2 jobs pay per year?

As of Sep 10, 2026, the average yearly pay for software engineer contract w2 in Rochester, MI is $135,788.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $110,500.00 and $159,200.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a software engineer contract W2?

A Software Engineer Contract W2 is a software engineer who is hired on a contract basis but is paid through a W2 arrangement, meaning they are technically an employee of a staffing agency or third-party employer rather than an independent contractor. This setup typically provides some employee benefits such as tax withholding, health insurance, and sometimes paid time off, depending on the agency. The engineer works on a specific project or for a set period, usually at a client company, but payroll and HR functions are managed by the agency. This is different from a 1099 contractor, who is self-employed and responsible for their own taxes and benefits.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a software engineer contract W2?

To thrive as a Software Engineer Contract W2, you need strong programming skills, problem-solving abilities, and a relevant degree in computer science or a related field. Familiarity with industry-standard development tools, source control systems like Git, and possibly certifications in specific technologies (such as AWS or Microsoft Azure) are typically expected. Excellent communication, adaptability, and time management skills help you collaborate effectively and deliver results on time in dynamic project environments. These capabilities ensure high-quality code delivery, smooth integration with client teams, and successful completion of contract objectives.

How does working as a software engineer on a W2 contract differ from permanent or 1099 contract positions in terms of team integration and project involvement?

As a Software Engineer on a W2 contract, you are typically treated as a temporary employee of the staffing agency, which means you often receive benefits (like health insurance) and have taxes withheld, similar to permanent staff. However, your project involvement may be more focused and time-bound, aligning with the terms of your contract. While you are integrated into the development team and collaborate closely with full-time engineers, you may not be included in long-term strategic planning or receive company equity. It's common to face the challenge of quickly adapting to new codebases and team cultures, but strong performance can sometimes open doors for contract extensions or permanent roles.

What is the difference between Software Engineer Contract W2 vs Software Engineer Contract 1099?

AspectSoftware Engineer Contract W2Software Engineer Contract 1099
Tax & PayrollEmployer handles taxes, withholdings, and benefitsIndependent contractor manages own taxes and benefits
Work EnvironmentTypically employed through staffing agencies or directly by companiesWorks independently, often with multiple clients
Credentials & CertificationsUsually requires relevant technical skills; no specific certification neededSame as W2; certifications may enhance opportunities
Legal & ContractualStandard employment contract with employee rightsIndependent contractor agreement with more flexibility

In summary, Software Engineer Contract W2 roles involve employer-managed taxes and benefits, offering more stability and legal protections. Contract 1099 positions provide greater independence but require managing taxes and benefits independently. The choice depends on your preference for stability versus flexibility.

What job categories do people searching Software Engineer Contract W2 jobs in Rochester, MI look for?

The top searched job categories for Software Engineer Contract W2 jobs in Rochester, MI are:

What cities near Rochester, MI are hiring for Software Engineer Contract W2 jobs?

Cities near Rochester, MI with the most Software Engineer Contract W2 job openings:

Software Engineer Contract W2 jobs near you

Senior Software Engineer

Auburn Hills, MI • On-site

Whisker
See more jobs at Whiskerexternal

$115K - $152K/yr

Full-time

Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, Retirement, PTO

Posted 25 days ago

Whisker rating

7.7

Company rating: 7.7 out of 10

Based on 6 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

Job description

Whisker is redefining what it means to live with cats-designing intelligent systems that remove friction, elevate the everyday, and celebrate the quiet brilliance of feline companionship. Today, Litter-Robot leads the category. Tomorrow, an entire ecosystem that expands what's possible for cats and the people who love them. We believe the future is feline. And we're imagining that future today.
We work onsite 4+ days a week, with our team based in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and Juneau, Wisconsin. Our team of 700+ passionate pet people thrives on collaboration, innovation, and the occasional office cameo from a four-legged friend.
What You'll Do:
The Senior Software Engineer, Platform builds and operates the shared services, pipelines, and infrastructure that Whisker's product engineering teams depend on. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role on a newly formed Platform team: you will design and operate backend services at scale, lead migrations of production systems that serve a live fleet of connected devices, and build the ingestion path that moves high-volume IoT telemetry into Whisker's analytics platform. You will own the reliability of what you build, including on-call, and you will raise the technical bar of the engineers around you through design review, mentorship, and the standards you set in code.
We build with AI agents here, deliberately and with guardrails, and we are extending that capability into the platform itself. You will be expected to work fluently with agentic tooling - and to hold the line that the engineer who opens the pull request is accountable for it, whether or not a model wrote the first draft.
This role suits an engineer already operating at the top of Senior who wants a wider platform charter than a single product team can offer.
Summary:
The Senior Software Engineer (Platform) at Whisker is responsible for designing, building, and operating the shared backend services, infrastructure, and high-volume IoT telemetry pipelines that support the company's product engineering teams. This senior-level individual contributor role requires hands-on expertise in cloud-native AWS environments and agentic development workflows, with a core focus on system reliability, platform migration, and technical leadership.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
This list of duties and responsibilities is not all-inclusive and may be expanded to include other duties and responsibilities as deemed necessary.
  • Designs, builds, and operates shared backend services and platform capabilities that other engineering teams depend on
  • Owns service reliability end to end including participation in an on-call rotation, incident response, and the operational health of the systems you build
  • Establishes and improves the paved road: service templates, deployment pipelines, observability defaults, and infrastructure-as-code that make the right thing the easy thing for other teams
  • Designs for scalability, availability, and operational cost, and makes those trade-offs explicit rather than implicit
  • Extends the platform's AI capability including inference paths, agent infrastructure, and the evaluation and guardrail work that makes agent output trustworthy in production
  • Leads migrations of production systems serving live connected devices, sequencing the work so that customers are not disrupted and rollback remains possible
  • Models the failure modes that matter for connected hardware like a device that is offline, a firmware version that cannot be updated, a network that drops mid-command - and designs for them ahead of time rather than discovering them in QE
  • Retires legacy paths deliberately, including the dual-run, backfill, and verification work that makes a cutover safe
  • Builds and scales ingestion pipelines for high-volume device telemetry, routing it reliably into Whisker's data and analytics platform
  • Designs data contracts and schemas that survive change, and partners with Data Engineering, Data Science, and Analytics so the data arriving is the data they can actually use
  • Instruments the pipeline itself - freshness, completeness, cost - so problems are detected upstream of the dashboard that depends on them
  • Owns work that crosses systems and team boundaries, anticipating integration problems early and driving them to resolution
  • Surfaces risk early and proposes alternatives, rather than escalating a problem without a path forward
  • Holds a high quality bar in code review and closes out systemic defects rather than their latest instance.
  • Mentors engineers deliberately and raises the capability of the team around them
  • Represents the team's technical position credibly to Product, TPM, and partner engineering teams, translating trade-offs into terms non-engineers can decide against
  • Champions best practices in testing, code quality, security, and observability, and helps establish patterns other engineers build against
  • Works agentically by default by decomposing work so an agent can be steered and reviewed at each step, curating the context and skill files that make agent output good, and treating a generated diff as a draft to be understood rather than output to be forwarded
  • Improves how the team builds with AI: better skills, sharper review gates, and honest assessment of where agents help and where they do not
  • Will perform additional responsibilities when required

Our Tech Stack:
  • Cloud-native, largely serverless infrastructure on AWS
  • Cloudflare, newly being introduced alongside AWS for edge and network-layer services
  • REST APIs via AWS API Gateway, and GraphQL APIs
  • DynamoDB and other serverless data stores
  • AWS IoT Core and streaming/event infrastructure for a large connected-device fleet
  • Databricks as the analytics and lakehouse platform
  • Amazon Bedrock and a growing set of AI and agent capabilities across the platform
  • Modern TypeScript and Python codebases
  • Infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and centralized observability tooling
  • Agentic development as the default workflow - curated skill libraries, project memory files, and agent-assisted pre-review, with a human gate at every step

High-Level 2-Year Scope of Product Development:
  • Platform: Help stand up and mature a shared platform layer - services, tooling, and conventions - that product-facing teams build on.
  • Migration: Move core device and services workloads onto the next-generation backend platform without customer-visible disruption.
  • Data: Build the telemetry ingestion path from device to analytics platform, at fleet scale and with reliability treated as a product requirement.
  • Reliability: Establish meaningful SLOs, on-call practice, and operational maturity for platform services.
  • Team Leadership: Define and drive technical direction for the broader software engineering practice.

Requirements
What You'll Bring:
  • BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience
  • 7+ years of backend development with 5+ years architecting systems in AWS
  • Strong proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript, and in SQL
  • 6+ years of experience in backend development
  • Hands-on experience with core AWS services relevant to this role, such as Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Kinesis, ECS, and IAM.
  • Current, hands-on practice with agentic development tooling, and the judgment to go with it: working an agent from structured context rather than one-line prompts, breaking work down so each step can be reviewed, correcting an approach before it becomes two hundred lines, and running an agent-assisted review pass before a human sees the pull request. We care about how you work, not which vendor's tool you have used.
  • Accountability for AI-assisted output. You can explain every line you submit and defend it in review; "the model wrote it" is not an answer you would give.
  • Experience building LLM- or agent-backed capability into a production system - inference integration, tool and function calling, retrieval, evaluation, or guardrails - or clear evidence you can pick it up quickly.
  • Demonstrated experience building and scaling data or event pipelines in production.
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and containerized workloads.
  • Experience with REST and/or GraphQL API design in distributed systems.
  • Experience carrying production on-call responsibility for systems you built.
  • Track record of leading a significant migration or platform initiative to completion.
  • Solid data modeling and systems design fundamentals, including designing for observability and cost.
  • Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical partners.
  • Strong problem-solving, organizational, and leadership skills.
  • High initiative, self-motivation, and ability to mentor and inspire engineering teams.
  • Maintains confidentiality of proprietary information
  • Ability to maintain a professional atmosphere in a fast-paced environment with numerous interactions and interruptions
  • Ability to establish and maintain cooperative working relationships with Team Members and colleagues
  • Comfortable with office pets (cats/dogs).

Not Required but Nice to Have!
  • Masters Degree
  • Familiarity with IoT systems, hardware integrations, or AWS IoT Core. You will work on a large connected-device platform here; we would rather teach it to a strong systems engineer than screen out on it.
  • Experience operating or migrating a connected-device fleet at scale.
  • Experience with Databricks, Spark, or a comparable lakehouse platform.
  • Experience with Cloudflare - Workers, CDN, DNS, or edge networking - or a comparable edge platform.
  • Experience with Amazon Bedrock or comparable managed inference.
  • Experience with MCP servers, agent harnesses, skill or prompt libraries, or evaluation frameworks - built, not just used.
  • Experience with Kafka or a comparable streaming platform.
  • Experience with Agile methodologies
  • Experience as a team leader
  • Familiarity with IoT systems / hardware integrations
  • Familiarity with JIRA, Confluence, or similar tools
  • Familiarity with Magento (1 or 2)

Benefits & Purrks:
Join a tenacious, inventive company that empowers team members to chart their own path, lead by grounding decisions in the "why", and has a strong sense of empathy and openness to new perspectives. Be a part of exciting growth, work with incredible people, and create tomorrow's pet products-plus a whole lot of extras. You will also be provided with:
  • Premium Medical/Dental/Vision insurance
  • Paid parental leave
  • Whisker Parents Program
  • 1 day "pawternity" leave for new pet adoption
  • Pet Insurance Discount
  • 401K match
  • Flexible spending accounts
  • Company-paid short-term disability and life insurance
  • Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
  • Generous paid time off
  • 14 Paid Holidays
  • Top of the line equipment
  • Pet-friendly office
  • Whisker products and swag
  • Continuing education Support
  • On-site gym with Peloton
  • Referral program

Statement of Inclusivity:
We believe different perspectives make Whisker better and strive to create a place where everyone has equal opportunities to thrive.
While Whisker is an AI-forward organization, we will not ask you to interview with an AI agent. We lead with a human first approach for hiring. We ask that you refrain from using an AI tools during any interview.
Please ensure to regularly check your email spam folder for any communication from Whisker to avoid missing important updates regarding your application status.

What Whisker employees say

Pay

Hours and flexibility

Workplace

Get the full story on Breakroom

Apply