Senior Software Engineer at Whisker
Auburn Hills, MI
—
Aug 16, 2026
Auburn Hills, MI
Sep 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor platform engineering role at a connected-device pet-tech company, responsible for designing and operating shared backend services, high-volume IoT telemetry ingestion pipelines, and the infrastructure that product teams build on. The work spans cloud-native AWS architecture, production migrations of live device fleets, AI/agent infrastructure, and establishing reliability practices including on-call ownership. Best suited to an experienced backend engineer comfortable with both systems design and agentic development workflows.
Senior level · 7+ years · Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI · Full-time
Long application — this platform typically asks you to create an account and re-enter your work history.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 180 people in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 140–240
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $133,635 (middle half $104,090–$156,640).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 18, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The role is primarily about building and shipping backend services, pipelines, and platform infrastructure — the day-to-day work is software development, not operating infrastructure someone else built — so 15-1252 Software Developers is the primary classification. 15-1244 is noted as an alternative given the significant operational/infrastructure ownership (on-call, SLOs, IoT fleet operations).
The posting states '7 years of backend development' in one place and '6 years of experience in backend development' in another — these appear to be a copy-editing inconsistency; the higher figure (7) is used for the overall years minimum as it appears first and in the more prominent requirements framing.
Python and TypeScript are listed as 'strong proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript' — they are interchangeable alternatives satisfying the same language requirement, so they are captured as a single gate with alternatives. Both are also listed separately as stack technologies, but the gate is the combined requirement.
AWS core services (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Kinesis, ECS, IAM) are explicitly listed under requirements with 'such as' — the qualifier means the specific tools are interchangeable examples of the broader AWS requirement, but the AWS platform itself is a hard gate. Each named service is captured individually as required since they are listed as concrete examples of what 'hands-on experience' means.
Agentic development tooling and LLM/agent-backed production experience are required per the requirements section; no specific vendor tool is mandated ('we care about how you work, not which vendor's tool you have used'), so LLMs is used as the canonical skill name.
IoT systems / AWS IoT Core, Databricks, Cloudflare, Amazon Bedrock, Kafka, Magento, and JIRA/Confluence all appear under the explicit 'Not Required but Nice to Have' section and are marked preferred accordingly.
A BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience is listed as a requirement, but because equivalent experience is explicitly accepted, the degree requirement is set to None.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
The role is onsite 4 days per week in Auburn Hills, MI (Detroit metro) or Juneau, WI; it is not fully remote.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.