Staff Software Engineer

Posted Sep 25

Description:

​Here at Shippo, we are the shipping layer of the internet and we consider ourselves to be one of the core building blocks of e-commerce.

Our mission is to make merchants successful through world class shipping. With our products and solutions, we level the playing field by providing our customers with best-in-class solutions that otherwise wouldn’t be available to them. Through Shippo, e-commerce businesses, marketplaces, platforms and a variety of logistics infrastructure providers are able to connect to shipping carriers around the world from one API and dashboard. We provide our customers with the most competitive shipping rates, print labels, automated international documents, shipment tracking, facilitate the returns process and more.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Core Enablement Team! This team is responsible for finding hidden problems in our software ecosystem and solving these problems in order to enable other teams in the Core Connectivity Division to build reliable and performant shipping APIs which allow Shippo’s customers to connect to carriers, calculate rates, create labels and track their packages, allowing stream-aligned teams to deliver value to our customers at a faster pace with higher quality.

We need a proactive, pragmatic, and collaborative person who adapts to the team dynamics and helps us find these hidden problems and design the solutions that will empower the entire division to build the best shipping API of the internet.

Shipping & handling responsibilities:

- Lead the design and deployment of scalable, resilient software services that handle millions of requests daily, ensuring they meet SLAs and complex business needs.

- Scalability & Maintainability: Promote microservices and efficient data models to optimize system scalability, performance, and maintainability.

- CI/CD Pipeline: Enhance the CI/CD pipeline for seamless automated testing and safe production releases, ensuring system stability.

- System Performance: Own system performance, ensuring services meet required response times and throughput, with continuous optimization.

- Database Design: Architect and maintain high-performance database schemas, supporting scalability and data integrity.

- System Architecture: Lead system design and refactoring to improve performance, reuse, and modularity.

- Peer Reviews & Testing: Participate in peer reviews and testing, contributing to high-quality standards through automated test suites.

- Business Collaboration: Collaborate with business teams to translate requirements into technical solutions that drive innovation.

- On-Call Support: Provide effective on-call support to address system incidents, using company tools to monitor and resolve issues.

- Testing & Automation: Champion best practices in testing and automation, supporting scaling efforts and continuous improvement.

- Business Development: Engage in gathering business requirements, development efforts, and ensuring solutions meet business needs.

Requirements

  • Leadership & Influence: Proven experience leading high-impact projects with cross-functional teams and setting architectural direction. Ability to influence technical strategy across the organization.
  • Technical Expertise & System Design: Extensive experience designing, optimizing, and implementing scalable APIs, services, and applications. Deep understanding of complex system architectures, including microservices and container-based designs.
  • Communication & Collaboration: Exceptional skills in verbal, written, and interpersonal communication, with a track record of mentoring engineering talent and articulating complex technical concepts clearly to various stakeholders.
  • Customer Focus & Innovation: Ability to anticipate customer needs and drive innovation, implementing solutions that align with both short-term and long-term goals.
  • Coding Skills & Technical Tools: Proficiency in server-side programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java) and database design. Experience with MVC frameworks (e.g., Django, .NET, Spring) and relevant tools, with a focus on performance optimization and selecting appropriate technologies.
  • Strategic Thinking & Problem Solving: Skilled in breaking down complex problems, anticipating challenges, and leading root cause analysis. Ability to address impediments proactively.
  • Craftsmanship & Excellence: Commitment to high standards of technical excellence and continuous improvement, including setting best practices within teams.
  • Educational Background & Language Proficiency: Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience. Advanced English fluency with strong communication skills for a global, diverse team.

Nice to Have

  • Experience working with Site Reliability Engineering principles such as reliability, availability and performance of critical systems and proven experience:
  • Defining and monitoring Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure that systems meet reliability and performance targets;
  • Using and managing Cloud Services including AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
  • Managing Kubernetes - deploying, managing and scaling applications in Kubernetes
  • Prior experience working or interacting with shipping and/or postal carriers
  • Experience using Python and Golang in production
  • Familiarity with microservices architectures
  • Experience integrating with APIs that use REST, SOAP, gRPC and other technologies
  • Interest and experience in performance tuning, concurrency, microservices, security, data analytics, and web stack
  • Experience with Django
  • Experience with DevOps tooling such as Docker, Terraform, CircleCI, Github Actions, New Relic, PagerDuty, etc
  • Experience with AWS/Cloud services such as EC2, S3, Lambda, Route 53, Cloud Formation, Cloudflare, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM, etc.

Sail through the process:

Here at Shippo, we celebrate inclusivity and are committed to creating equal access to opportunities for people from all backgrounds, perspectives and geographies. These values define who we are and everything we do. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance, or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please contact us at accommodations@goshippo.com

Shippos in the wild:

Our people, much like the packages we help ship, are all over the world. This means, through our remote-first program, “Shippos Everywhere”, our roles can be based anywhere in the US with the exception of Delaware, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia and many roles can be based internationally.

For locations outside of the US and Ireland, the employment contracts are powered by Remote.com (all Shippo perks still apply - including equity!). What we want to emphasize is that you can be successful at Shippo regardless of location.