Senior Python Engineer

About the Product

Before you read on, take a look around you. Everything you see has been shipped, often multiple times before reaching its destination. Global ecommerce sales are expected to total $5.5 trillion worldwide in 2022 and continue growing over the next few years. 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, and platforms 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 Senior Backend Engineer to join our Carriers team! Businesses, partners, customers, and users worldwide rely on Shippo’s integration to a global network of carriers to streamline their fulfillment workflow. You can look forward to expanding our Shipping Carrier Library for both domestic and international shipments. The Carriers team is responsible for developing new features, building infrastructure and maintaining current services. As a Senior Engineer, you will provide leadership and oversight in technical design, systems architecture, and coding for your team as well as the Engineering team as a whole.

Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, test, and deploy software services with high SLAs that can handle millions of requests a day
• Ensure scalability and maintainability through microservices adoption, decoupling of concerns from the data model, queuing of jobs, application layering and container-based software distribution.
• Continue to build out and enhance our CI/CD pipeline for smooth and safe production releases via automated testing and verification.
• Verify and ensure performance and correctness of systems in response time and throughput.
• Architect systems and refactor existing systems for optimal performance and reuse
• Participate in peer reviews, testing and in design reviews for new features, products, and systems
• Collaborate with business teams and provide early input to new product ideas and functionality
• Define, implement, and monitor operational metrics to ensure performance and quality.
• Work with a sense of urgency and iterate quickly in an agile process.
• Mentor more junior engineers on engineering best practices.
• Exceptional problem solving skills: demonstrated ability to understand business challenges and translate those into technical solutions.
• Being on team on-call rotation and able to respond quickly to system incidents

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience in software development
• Coding experience in server-side programming languages (e.g. Python, Go, Java, Ruby) as well as database languages (SQL)
• Experience working with server-side frameworks (e.g. Django, FastAPI, .NET, Spring, Rails, Phoenix)
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work with all levels of the organization.
• Past experience and success building and supporting scalable APIs, services, or applications
• Solid understanding of object-oriented programming and familiarity with various design and architectural patterns.
• Exceptional verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills. You are adept at communicating relevant information clearly and concisely.
• Deep understanding of customer needs and passion for customer success.
• Ability to look ahead to identify opportunities, foster a culture of innovation, and build for scale.
• Exhibit core behaviors focused on craftsmanship, continuous improvement, and team success
• BS or MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Bonus:

• Prior experience working or interacting with shipping and/or postal carriers
• Familiarity with microservices architectures
• Experience integrating with APIs that use REST, SOAP, gRPC and other technologies
• Experience with Django and/or FastAPI
• Experience using Python and/or Golang in production at scale
• Interest and experience in performance tuning, concurrency, security, data pipelines, and web servers
• Experience with messaging systems such as NSQ, Kafka, SQS and Celery
• Experience with DevOps tooling such as Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, New Relic, PagerDuty, etc
• Experience with AWS/Cloud services such as EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Route 53, Cloud Formation, Cloudflare, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM, etc.

Shippo Values:

• Path to Green

When we get stuck we come up with solutions and build a path. We make the impossible possible.  

• Haven’t Won Yet 

Shipping is incredibly complex. We are just at the beginning of what we want to achieve. We are here to win. We bring that level of intensity to work every day.

• Drivers not Packages

We are the drivers behind the success of the company. Everyone here is actively pushing the company forward every day with their actions. We love packages but we don’t want to be one. We are not passively along for the ride but we are all owners of Shippo’s success

• Ship to Learn

We take an iterative approach to delivering value. Speed matters and we ship to learn. We have a growth mindset. We learn from our mistakes and failures to make us better. We take chances, try new things and learn from them.

• Our Customers Win

If our customers’ ship more we ship more. We put delivering customer value first in everything that we do. 

• Compassionate Candor

We call out the Hippo in the room. We communicate from a position of care and our pursuit of a common goal. Candor and compassion go hand in hand in making us better as one Shippo team.

What You Get:

• We’re building a diverse team of talented individuals who bring different perspectives to the business and who feel a sense of inclusion and belonging when they join our team;
• We welcome and celebrate new ideas and allow you to make an immediate impact on the team;
• Unlimited PTO for any reason, including sick days (no specified limits), flexible work schedule;
• Opportunity to attend professional development training, certifications, and conferences;
• Health/Sport budget
• Remote work.