--- title: 'Staff Backend Engineer (Rails) at Tread' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-engineer-rails-tread-san-francisco-khe20686nmmn' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-19' --- # Staff Backend Engineer (Rails) at Tread - **Company:** Tread - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $180k–$220k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-05-06 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tread/c35ad3bd-ee36-433a-9183-17c12f59f3cb ## Job description ## About Tread Tread is an AI-native vertical SaaS platform transforming construction materials logistics—a massive, essential industry that moves the aggregate, asphalt, and concrete behind every road, bridge, and building. In March 2026, we crossed $1Bn in monthly delivered load value on the platform, and we’re at ~$XM ARR and growing fast. We are a lean Engineering organization with BE, FE, and Mobile all <10 people total. Every individual has a meaningful impact on the code base and the product we deliver to customers. Our AI-powered platform serves Haulers, Producers, and Contractors—optimizing truck routing, loaded-mile delivery, and project planning while delivering exceptional customer service through personalized AI agents. We’re a Series A company backed by Mucker Capital, and we’re building the team that will take us from $XM to $XXM+ ARR. ## The Role We're hiring backend engineers to own our systems end-to-end — the data models, workflows, and APIs behind dispatch, ticketing, settlements, and integrations. You'll work with frontend, mobile, product, and our Forward Deployed Engineers, and you'll have meaningful input on how the system should behave for scalability and performance. Our code has been ~100% AI-generated since March 2026. It's changed how the team works. We're building the software factory that turns customer, PM, and engineering input into safe deployable code. We expect the engineering team to be spinning up agents and managing the output rather than writing code by hand. While AI generates code here, engineers own the architecture, invariants, tests, review, security, and production behavior of everything we ship. Stack Rails API (Ruby), Postgres, REST. React on the web, Flutter on mobile. AWS. ## What You'll Do - Manage state machines across projects, orders, jobs, and loads. - Operate a telematics layer with billions of rows tracking thousands of trucks across North America — live position, route history, mileage attribution. - Design geofencing and geo-driven event processing that turns raw GPS into structured dispatch events. - Build algorithmic dispatch and optimization, including automated load assignment. - Run the payments stack that settles ~$1B/month in hauler payouts. - Ship customer-facing agentic workflows on our MCP and LLM features. - Build integrations with telematics providers, scale houses, ERPs, and other external systems. - Shape our internal AI tooling — shared agent skills, automated review, prompt and skill infrastructure. ## Requirements - Strong Rails experience, or strong experience in a comparable backend framework and willingness to ramp fast. - You think in systems — interfaces, schemas, invariants, failure modes — and you've shipped designs that held up as the product scaled past their original assumptions. - You can model workflows where the source of truth is unreliable and the system still has to settle correctly. - High ownership. - Daily, opinionated use of AI coding tools. ## Preferred - You can debug production issues and explain root causes. - Background in logistics, ops, payments, or fintech. ## How We Work We deploy continuously, review PRs the same day, and invest in correctness up front so on-call stays light. AI tooling is part of the infrastructure. We maintain a shared internal skills library across Claude Code and Cursor, with namespaced agent skills the whole team uses for reviewing diffs and resolving PR feedback. We engineer the agent loop itself — skills, prompts, review pipelines. We invest in the dev environment and CI work that makes coding agents useful: devcontainers, fast feedback, pre-approved permissions, cloud agent support. Improving the SDLC is first-class engineering work. Before You Apply This isn't the right role if you want to: - Write only CRUD endpoints. - Work from fully-specified requirements. - Treat AI coding tools as a side experiment. How to Apply Send something you've worked on where the backend had real complexity. A repo, a write-up, an architecture doc, a postmortem. One good thing beats a long resume. ## About Tread ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Tread is an AI-native vertical SaaS platform that digitizes and optimizes bulk materials logistics for the construction industry. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Not publicly confirmed (CEO Sameer Bhalla is often associated with the company’s founding team) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Construction materials logistics, supply chain software, construction technology (ConTech) - **Target customers**: B2B – construction materials producers (e.g., aggregates, asphalt, concrete), haulers/fleets, and contractors; serves both global enterprises and family-run businesses - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Help producers, haulers, and contractors save time and money by digitizing the end-to-end process of buying and moving construction materials.” [tread.ai] ## Products & Services - **[Tread Platform]**: A unified, cloud‑based system for order management, dispatch, billing, and payments. Includes a mobile app for drivers and field staff, AI‑powered truck routing and loaded‑mile optimization, and personalized AI agents for customer service. Integrates with scale houses, ERPs, and other third‑party systems. [tread.ai][tracxn.com] - **[Tread Materials Intelligence]**: An analytics layer providing insights on hauling performance, compliance, and payroll automation. The platform is SOC2 compliant. [LinkedIn post] ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric**: Crossed **$1 billion in monthly delivered load value** on the platform as of March 2026 (at ~$XM ARR, not disclosed) [fwddeploy.com] - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Crosslink Capital (led Series A in 2022), Real Ventures (led Seed round), Mucker Capital (Series A round in 2026), Techstars. [tracxn.com][fwddeploy.com] - **Growth Signals**: - 32.4% headcount growth year‑over‑year (22 employees as of mid‑2026) [LinkedIn] - 7 active job postings across engineering, sales, and marketing roles [LinkedIn] - Expanded from a single office in San Francisco to a second office in Toronto, Canada [LinkedIn] - Customers include **Cemex, Tomlinson, Martin Marietta, R&R Transport, John Aarts Group, Gulfshore Trucking** [tread.ai] ## Competitive Advantages - **AI‑native vertical SaaS**: Deeply embedded AI (routing, planning, customer agents) tailored specifically to the construction materials supply chain, creating a data‑driven moat. - **End‑to‑end unification**: Replaces fragmented legacy tools (order management, dispatch, billing) with a single, modern platform, reducing manual work and errors. - **Field‑driven product development**: Engineers work directly with customers in the field, enabling rapid, context‑aware feature development (feedback loop measured in hours) [fwddeploy.com]. - **Strong customer validation**: Serves both large public companies and small family‑run operations, demonstrating broad market fit. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale ARR**: The top priority is growing from current ($XM) to $XXM+ ARR [fwddeploy.com]. - **Hire field‑facing engineers**: “Forward Deployed Engineers” who combine engineering skills with customer‑facing roles to bridge product and operations. - **Deepen AI capabilities**: Continue to build AI agents, intelligent routing, and predictive analytics that make the platform stickier and more valuable. - **Expand geographic footprint**: Grow the dual‑office (San Francisco / Toronto) team and increase presence at industry events. ## Why Work Here - **Early‑stage growth**: Series A company with proven product‑market fit and rapid expansion – opportunity to have high ownership and impact. - **Culture of autonomy and ownership**: Engineers are expected to ship features the same day they identify customer problems; low‑ego, high‑ownership environment [fwddeploy.com]. - **Remote/hybrid policy**: Team is distributed across North America (including one team member on a Caribbean island); bi‑annual offsites bring the whole company together [LinkedIn]. - **Engineering focus**: Modern tech stack (Rails, GraphQL, React, Intercom, PostHog) and a commitment to building with AI. The company values builder‑minded engineers who enjoy being on customer sites. - **Perks**: SOC2 compliance shows seriousness about security; opportunities to travel and work directly with construction logistics operations. ## Sources 1. [tread.ai](https://tread.ai/) 2. [LinkedIn](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/treadai) 3. [Tracxn](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/tread/__f1TTZCnbB-f4xSSPeTGTa4PaO1fUqC-KaJggmL3Q_lI) 4. [SignalHire](https://www.signalhire.com/companies/tread-inc) 5. [Forward Deployed Engineer Job Posting](https://www.fwddeploy.com/jobs/ai-native-forward-deployed-engineer-93cab6f3) ## Other roles at Tread - [AI Finance Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-finance-operations-manager-tread-san-francisco-vdkc51ebww75) — San Francisco, CA - [Head of Product](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-product-tread-san-francisco-jvcq3s0r8hay) — San Francisco, CA - [AI-Native Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-native-forward-deployed-engineer-tread-san-francisco-hvjzdhs194ae) — San Francisco, CA - [Head of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-tread-san-francisco-7gn2xfseegn8) — San Francisco, CA - [AI Native Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-native-forward-deployed-engineer-tread-4e8ev2es14hb)