Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer — Grounded

Detroit, MI (in-person)

About Grounded

Grounded is a 25-person Detroit-based startup building modular electric platforms for specialty vehicles. We take cab chassis from OEMs like Ford and Harbinger and build configurable vehicle systems on top, serving mobile healthcare, RVs, command centers, food and beverage, pet care, and more. Our customers include Colgate, Nokia, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and Portland PD. We've raised ~$5M in VC funding and are shipping vehicles in market today.

We also build our own software: a mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer system that lets customers monitor and control vehicle systems remotely. We design, fabricate, and assemble everything in-house at our facility in Corktown.

The Role

We're hiring a senior software engineer to build the software that makes a Grounded vehicle smart: our mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer system that let customers monitor and control their vehicles remotely. You'll also help us tackle our biggest internal challenge — automating the design and manufacturing workflow so we can scale mass customization (parametric design, dynamic BOM generation, automated work instructions, and a customer-facing configurator).

It's a broad, full-stack role at a hardware company: from onboard systems and telemetry, to the app and dashboard customers use every day, to internal tools that let a salesperson configure a vehicle without an engineer touching it.

What you'd actually do

• Build and own features across our mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer / telemetry system

• Design the data models and APIs that connect vehicles in the field to the dashboard and app

• Build internal tooling to automate design-to-manufacturing: programmatic/parametric CAD generation, dynamic BOMs, automated work instructions, and a configurator

• Work closely with mechanical and electrical engineers to turn physical systems into software (sensors, controls, monitoring)

• Own features end to end — design, build, ship, and iterate on real customer and shop-floor feedback

• Make pragmatic architecture decisions for a small team moving fast

What we're looking for

• 7+ years building and shipping production software, full-stack

• Strong in a modern web stack (e.g. React/TypeScript, Node, a relational database) and comfortable across frontend, backend, and APIs

• Pragmatic and product-minded; you can own ambiguous problems end to end

• Comfortable working at the hardware/software boundary — telemetry, devices, or IoT

• Startup or small-company experience strongly preferred: you ship, you own, you don't need layers of process

Nice-to-haves

• Embedded / IoT / fleet telemetry experience

• Experience with CAD automation, parametric design, or CPQ/configurator systems

• Cloud infrastructure and data-pipeline experience

Compensation

Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in Grounded + comprehensive health insurance

Why this role is different

You'll be the software person at a company that builds physical vehicles — so your work spans the app in a customer's hand, the computer onboard the vehicle, and the internal tools that decide how fast the whole company can scale. Few software roles let you touch hardware, product, and core operations at once, with this much ownership and direct access to the leadership team.