---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer - Platform Engineering at santehq.com'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-platform-engineering-santehq-com-new-york-mf5av74y78b8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Senior Software Engineer - Platform Engineering at santehq.com

- **Company:** santehq.com
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/santehq-com/am9icG9zdDoNyHH99coMvPMbD6vzCk9q

## Job description

Senior Software Engineer - Platform Engineering

## About Santé

Santé is the #1 operating system for local retailers.

Our platform runs the entire store — point of sale, integrated payments, eCommerce, inventory management, delivery-app integrations, marketing, bookkeeping, and AI Agents — so the owners of liquor, grocery, and convenience stores can compete like the big chains without losing what makes them local.

We're building a future where the corner liquor store has better technology than the national retailer: one place for selling to customers everywhere with AI agents that spots slow-moving inventory and creates the promotion to move it. Every feature we ship lands in real stores the same week, and the feedback loop is direct — our customers call us by name.

We move fast and ship daily. AI-assisted engineering isn't a talking point here; agents like Devin, Claude, and Codex are part of how the team works every day, and engineers who master that leverage ship multiples of what they could alone.

## About the Team

Platform Engineering owns the foundation everything else at Santé is built on: Observability, Architecture, and POS / Checkout.

When a customer taps a card at a card terminal, this team's code decides whether that moment is instant, correct, and durable — through processor hiccups, database stress, and real-world edge cases. When any other team ships, this team's telemetry is how we know it worked. Platform Engineering is small by design and force-multiplied by tooling: its members carry the deepest context in the company and set the technical standards every other team builds on.

## About the Role

You'll be a technical owner on the systems where correctness is non-negotiable: the sale write path, the payments integration layer, the database fleet, and the observability stack. This means working from ambiguous production signals ("this store's drawer count is off by $0.47") down to root cause, then designing the fix so the whole class of bug disappears. You'll partner with every other team — Money Movement, Merchant Experience, and Applied AI all build on your primitives — and with real store owners whose businesses run on what you ship. Beyond building, you'll establish the patterns (idempotency, transactional boundaries, caching, instrumentation) that the rest of engineering adopts.

In this role, you will

- Own the sale write path — the transactional core that records every sale in every store — including idempotency guarantees, race-condition elimination, split-payment correctness, and graceful degradation under database stress
- Drive payments reliability end to end: card terminal terminal integrations, processor routing, preauth recovery, retries and reconciliation when the processor or the network misbehaves
- Lead our observability program on Datadog — APM, RUM, and DBM with full log/trace correlation, structured logging with PII redaction, and the monitors and DORA metrics every team runs on
- Hunt performance across a busy Postgres fleet: read-replica strategy, query-plan and index work, N+1 elimination, and caching layers (ElastiCache) that hold up on the year's biggest sales days
- Establish architectural patterns for multi-location retailers, offline-resilient POS, and high-write transactional workloads — and drive their adoption across teams
- Multiply your output with AI agents: direct, review, and productionize agent-written code as a core part of your workflow

## Your background looks something like this

- 5+ years building production software, with deep experience in TypeScript/Node full-stack systems
- Real depth in PostgreSQL: you read query plans for fun, know when an index helps and when it hurts, and have operated replicas under load
- Distributed-systems instincts — idempotency keys, transactional boundaries, race conditions, and retry semantics are second nature
- Experience owning observability for a production system (Datadog, or equivalent with OpenTelemetry)
- A bias for root cause over patch, and a track record of turning one-off incidents into eliminated bug classes
- Comfort operating with high ownership in a small team where your decisions become the standard

Even better

- Payments experience: EMV terminals, processors (Datacap or similar), preauth/capture flows, or PCI-adjacent systems
- Retail or POS domain experience, especially inventory, reconciliation, or multi-location operations
- Familiarity with our stack: Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, ElastiCache, Aurora/RDS/RDS Proxy, PostgreSQL / pgvector
- Experience directing AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Devin) and building the guardrails that make them safe at scale
- History of establishing technical standards or architectural principles adopted across teams
- Experience building LLM-powered product features (we run OCR/ CV,  recommendation, and agent systems in production)

## Compensation

$220k – $280k + Meaningful equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and scope of responsibilities. In addition to base salary, we offer meaningful early-stage equity — this team's work is the foundation the company compounds on.

## Benefits

- Fully company-covered medical and dental benefits.
- 401(k)
- Catered Lunches and Dinners: Santé provides dinner each evening for employees who would like to eat and connect with the team. Lunch is provided on a weekly basis

## About santehq.com

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Santé is an all-in-one, AI-powered point-of-sale and operations platform purpose-built for liquor and wine retailers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; Y Combinator S23)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Darren Fike (Co-Founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Vertical SaaS for retail (wine & spirits), fintech, e-commerce
- **Target customers**: B2B – independent liquor stores, wine shops, and multi-location retailers; expanding into convenience and local grocery stores
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Help liquor store owners build long-term equity in their businesses” and “solve real-world problems with AI” – giving small business owners time back with a modern operating system.

## Products & Services
- **Santé POS**: A unified point-of-sale system that consolidates receiving, inventory, e-commerce, delivery marketplace integrations (DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, Instacart), marketing, reporting, and payments into a single platform.
- **AI-Powered Invoice Scanning**: Automatically extracts data from distributor invoices, updating inventory levels and unit costs in minutes.
- **Marketing Agent**: Segments customers based on purchase history and triggers email/SMS campaigns for restocks, promotions, or tasting events.
- **Automated E‑commerce Cataloging**: Auto-generates SEO-optimized descriptions and images for thousands of SKUs.
- **RFID-Based Theft Monitoring & Compliance**: Includes state-by-state alcohol shipping regulation management and bottle/keg tracking.
- **Smart Multi-Store Inventory**: Enables seamless inventory transfers between locations with predictive reordering.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metrics**: Total funding of **$7.6M** (seed round, Feb 2026); processed **$500M+ in annual card volume** across hundreds of stores; **400% growth** in the last year.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bonfire Ventures (lead), Operator Collective, Y Combinator, Veridical Ventures, TipTop VC, UpHonest Capital.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanding from liquor stores into grocery and convenience verticals; headcount grew ~1.9% monthly (now 31 employees across 10 countries); backed by top-tier vertical SaaS investors.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep industry focus**: Built specifically for the complex regulatory, inventory (vintage, break‑pack pricing, keg returns) and distributor relationship challenges of the wine & spirits industry.
- **AI‑first platform**: Proprietary AI suite that automates manual workflows (invoice entry, cataloging, customer segmentation) – a moat that legacy POS systems lack.
- **Unified ecosystem**: Combines POS, e‑commerce, delivery, marketing, and payments in one system, eliminating the need for multiple vendors.
- **Fast adoption & traction**: 400% YoY growth and hundreds of stores live, with customers like Wine Cellar of Queens expanding store count because of Santé.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale sales teams** to capture more of the fragmented U.S. liquor retail market.
- **Develop new products** for grocers and convenience stores with similarly complex operations (e.g., age‑restricted items, varied pricing).
- **Continue investing in AI** to further automate retail workflows and differentiate from competitors.

## Why Work Here
- **In‑person culture**: Based in Flatiron, NYC – the team builds together in person with a “world‑class team.”
- **High impact**: With only 31 employees, every hire has outsized influence on product direction and company growth.
- **Backed by elite investors**: Y Combinator, Bonfire Ventures, and others provide strong strategic support and credibility.
- **Mission‑driven**: Work on technology that directly helps small business owners reclaim time and build equity – tangible real‑world impact.
- **Growth trajectory**: 400% annual growth and a clear path to expanding into adjacent retail verticals means career advancement opportunities.
- **Values‑driven**: Company emphasizes clarity of vision, solving real problems with AI, and giving employees “a shot on goal” to win.

## Sources
1. [LinkedIn – Santé Company Page](https://linkedin.com/company/santehq)
2. [Santé Official Website – About Us](https://www.santehq.com/about)
3. [Y Combinator – Santé Jobs Page](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sante/jobs)
4. [Indexed.vc – Santé Company Profile](https://indexed.vc/companies/santehq)
5. [WebWire – Santé Raises $7.6M Press Release](https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=350499)

## Other roles at santehq.com

- [Head of Content](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-content-santehq-com-new-york-ysa5z75pc84n) — New York, NY
- [Founding Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-marketer-santehq-com-new-york-rse3x74vpsmh) — New York, NY
- [Senior Software Engineer - Money Movement](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-money-movement-santehq-com-new-york-fk7r81mnbsaw) — New York, NY
- [Applied AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-santehq-com-new-york-4ty8mr8eqdf9) — New York, NY
- [Sales Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-santehq-com-new-york-a6q950sscnx5) — New York, NY
- [Implementations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/implementations-engineer-santehq-com-new-york-vj1x34fgywts) — New York, NY
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-santehq-com-new-york-yyx9bqxv2kzx) — New York, NY