Who we are:
Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.
Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.
Visit gomotive.com to learn more.
About the Role
The Backline Support Engineer is a technical owner for our most complex and high-impact field issues, with a strong focus on IoT hardware, embedded firmware, and the software services that interact with them.
You will be responsible for end-to-end debugging across the stack: from physical devices installed in vehicles (gateways, AI dashcams, sensors), through connectivity and firmware behavior, up into the internal services that manage configuration, data, and updates. You will lead investigations for critical escalations, guide cross-functional teams toward permanent fixes, and turn real-world learnings into better observability, tools, and product quality.
This role is not an integrations engineer role. While you may occasionally touch APIs and server-side components that interact with devices, your core strength is system-level debugging across hardware, firmware, and software, especially in real-world, noisy environments.
What You’ll Do
- Debug complex device issues end-to-end
Investigate and resolve the toughest issues impacting our devices in the field, combining evidence from hardware behavior, firmware logs, and service-side signals to identify true root cause.
- Perform deep hardware and firmware diagnostics
Use device logs, serial/console output, configuration snapshots, telemetry, and on-vehicle data (e.g., CAN/J1939, OBD-II) to understand how devices are behaving under real-world conditions.
- Triage hardware vs. firmware vs. software causes
Systematically narrow down whether a symptom is driven by physical installation, harness/vehicle interface, firmware logic, or the services that manage devices, and drive the right fix with the right team.
- Reproduce and validate issues in lab and field-like setups
Work with simulators, harnesses, bench setups, and controlled test fleets to reproduce customer issues, validate hypotheses, and confirm fixes before broad rollout.
- Support and validate firmware releases
Participate in pre- and post-release validation for firmware drops, watching for regressions, rollout/rollback issues, and edge cases that only appear in specific vehicles, environments, or customer workflows.
- Perform software-level debugging for device-facing services
Read and interpret application/service logs, error messages, and state transitions in the server-side components that configure devices, manage telemetry, or orchestrate firmware updates; partner with Software/Backend Engineering to resolve defects.
- Lead clear, actionable RCAs
Own and deliver root cause analyses that explain what failed across hardware, firmware, and software boundaries, why it failed, impact to customers, and concrete long-term remediation and prevention steps.
- Shape observability and diagnostics
Provide requirements and feedback to Engineering on device and service logging, telemetry, and health signals so that future issues can be detected and diagnosed faster and more reliably.
- Mentor and upskill the wider support organization
Document repeatable troubleshooting flows, decision trees, and best practices; coach other Support and Field teams on how to recognize and handle hardware/firmware/software issues before they need escalation.
- Drive cross-functional incident response
Act as a technical lead during high-severity incidents, coordinating with Hardware, Firmware, Software/Backend Engineering, Product, and Field/Professional Services to stabilize fleets and communicate status and next steps.
What We’re Looking For
- 2–3+ years in Backline / Tier 3 / Escalation Support, Systems Engineering, or a similar role, with hands-on ownership of hardware and firmware issues in production environments.
- Demonstrated strength in system-level debugging that spans hardware, firmware, and software, not just one layer in isolation.
- Experience reading and interpreting device and firmware logs, serial output, and field telemetry to understand state machines, timing, and error conditions.
- Familiarity with vehicle/industrial interfaces such as CAN/J1939, OBD-II, sensors, and cameras, and how those signals are consumed by on-device firmware and higher-level services.
- Understanding of core embedded concepts: power/boot behavior, watchdogs, resets, configuration, over-the-air updates, and how these can fail in noisy real-world conditions.
- Comfort with software-level debugging for services that interface with devices (e.g., interpreting application logs, tracing configuration/state through components, identifying where behavior diverges from expected flows).
- Ability to design and execute reproduction strategies in lab or controlled environments and translate results into concrete bug reports and test cases.
- Proven record of delivering clear RCAs and CAPA (corrective and preventive actions) for recurring or systemic incidents.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with experience working closely with Hardware, Firmware, and Software/Backend Engineering, as well as Product and Field/Professional Services.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex device and system behavior to both deeply technical audiences and non-technical stakeholders (e.g., customers, executives, frontline support).
- Bonus: experience in telematics, automotive, industrial IoT, or other safety-critical/mission-critical device ecosystems, and familiarity with using scripting (e.g., Python/Bash) to automate diagnostics or data analysis.
Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.
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The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.
All job postings are for existing vacancies. Please note; some interviews or new-hire training sessions may be held in person at one of our global offices.
