Senior Software Engineer

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.

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.

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.

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…