Associate Full-Stack Software Engineer

About Us

At Intramotev, we are building autonomous battery-electric railcars that move freight off congested highways and onto rail. Our vehicles are self-propelled — no locomotive required — which means lower emissions, lower cost, and a freight network that actually scales. We're based in St. Louis and we are a small team, so the work you do here ships to real hardware.

Role Overview

We're hiring an Associate Software Engineer to build the software systems behind our autonomous railcar fleet. You'll work primarily on backend services and internal tools — the systems that collect vehicle telemetry, manage fleet operations, and give our operations team real-time visibility into what our railcars are doing. You'll also contribute to frontend development for our internal dashboards and operator interfaces.

Schedule

This is a full time, in-office position, based in St. Louis, MO.

What Your First 6 Months Look Like

Months 1- 2

Get hands-on with the codebase — start by reading, running, and debugging existing modules rather than writing new code from scratch. Pair with a mentor to understand our vehicle control architecture and development workflow. Set up your local development environment, get comfortable with our CI pipeline and testing practices, and ship your first small fix or improvement through code review by the end of your second month.

Months 3-4

Own well-defined features or modules end-to-end — from understanding the requirement, through implementation, testing, and code review. You'll be writing code that runs on real hardware, so you'll start developing an instinct for how software quality translates to physical system behavior. Expect to be working across two or three focused areas rather than one, and to be asking fewer questions about "how does this work" and more about "should we do it this way or that way."

Months 5-6

Take on moderately complex tasks with decreasing guidance. Start contributing to technical design discussions — not leading them yet, but asking the questions that shape them. You might propose a small improvement to a tool, a testing pattern, or a piece of infrastructure that makes the team's work better. By this point, you'll have enough context to mentor the next new person on at least one part of the system.

What You Will Do Day to Day

• Write, test, and maintain backend services and internal tools in Python and C#.
• Build and improve internal dashboards and operator interfaces using Flutter.
• Write unit and integration tests for your code and contribute to maintaining overall test coverage.
• Investigate and fix bugs in production systems, including reproducing issues, diagnosing root causes, and writing regression tests.
• Participate in code reviews — both giving and receiving feedback.
• Work with experienced engineers to break down product requirements into concrete implementation tasks.
• Contribute to documentation and internal technical knowledge bases.
• Support field testing and integration of software on physical rail vehicles when needed.
  

How We Work

• The engineering team is small — you'll typically work in groups of two to four on focused projects, with the broader team of around ten collaborating across efforts. At this size, there's no hiding behind process or hierarchy. You'll be in the room for design discussions, your code will be reviewed by senior engineers who know the system deeply, and your questions will be answered by the people who built what you're working on.
• We do daily standups, asynchronous communication in Discord, and design reviews for anything nontrivial. Code review is mandatory — not as a gate, but as a practice the whole team treats as a teaching and learning tool. For an associate engineer, this means you'll get consistent, detailed feedback on your code from day one, and you'll start reviewing others' code as you build context.
• Some of what we're building doesn't have a known solution. Autonomous rail is a young field, and certain problems require experimentation — building a prototype, testing it, learning from what doesn't work, and iterating. If you're the kind of person who's uncomfortable when the spec is ambiguous or the path forward isn't obvious, that's worth knowing. If that sounds like the interesting part, you will fit in well.
• The role is in-office in St. Louis, with occasional domestic travel for field testing, vehicle integration, and customer demonstrations — the kind of travel where you see your software running on actual hardware.

Our Interview Process

We evaluate depth of understanding over breadth of buzzwords. Our process includes a brief technical screen online focused on fundamentals, a take-home exercise involving real-world code (with a defined time scope), and a final on-site conversation with the engineering team. We provide clear expectations before each stage and aim to complete the process within three weeks.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications (Required Skills/Experience):

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• Solid understanding of data structures and algorithms.
• Proficiency in a programming language such as C#, Python.
• Proficiency with Git, including branching, merging, and collaborative workflows (pull requests, code review).
• Experience writing unit tests and a working understanding of why automated testing matters in production software.
• Comfort working in a Linux command-line environment, including navigating the filesystem, running scripts, and using common development tools from the terminal.
• A portfolio of technical work you can walk us through — this could be a GitHub profile, personal projects, research contributions, or significant coursework projects. We will review this as part of our evaluation.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. CPT/OPT is supported.
• Fluent in both written and verbal English.
  

Preferred Qualifications

None of these are required — if you meet the basic qualifications and the role excites you, apply. But if you bring some of these, you will ramp faster and we will notice.

• Experience building frontend applications with Flutter or a similar UI framework (React, SwiftUI, etc.). We use Flutter for our operator-facing interfaces and internal tools.
• Working knowledge of Docker and containerized development workflows. Bonus if you've debugged a container that worked on your machine but not in CI.
• Familiarity with LLM-based development tools (Cursor, Claude, Copilot, etc.) and a thoughtful perspective on when they help and when they get in the way.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines — even if it was just configuring GitHub Actions for a personal project.
• Coursework or project experience in real-time systems, or robotics. We don't expect depth in all of these, but exposure to any of them gives you useful context for the problems we're solving.
• Experience reading and contributing to an existing codebase rather than only building projects from scratch. Most professional engineering is understanding and extending systems that already exist.
• Comfort working across disciplines — if you've collaborated with hardware engineers, mechanical engineers, or anyone outside of software, that experience translates directly here.

Why Join Us?

• Your code runs on real machines. Most software jobs are about moving data between screens and databases. Here, the software you write controls physical vehicles carrying real freight on real rail lines. The feedback loop between your code and the physical world is short, visible, and unforgiving in the best way — you will develop engineering instincts that most developers never get the chance to build.
• Small team, real ownership. We're not a place where junior engineers spend two years modifying config files before touching anything important. You'll own features end-to-end, participate in design decisions early, and ship code that matters to the product from your first months. The tradeoff is honest: a small team means fewer layers of support and more responsibility on your shoulders sooner.
• The problem is worth working on. Freight trucking is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions and highway fatalities in the country, and the economics of rail have been broken for decades. We're not optimizing ad clicks — we're building the infrastructure that moves freight off highways and onto electric rail. If that distinction matters to you, you'll feel it in the work every day.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Intramotev is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, genetic factors, military/veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.

Relocation

This position does not offer relocation.

Communication

Emails about this position will come from Breezy with from intramotev-autonomous-rail.breezy-mail.com domain. Please confirm that emails from that domain are being received successfully.

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