Senior Staff Engineer (Back-end & Infrastructure)

Basics

- Based in: Paris or full-remote position (1-hour difference from Paris timezone)
- Contract: : Full-time permanent contract
- Manager: Florian, VP of Engineering
- Team: Technical team, cross-functional role
- Budget: from 80 to 92 k€ base salary + bonus

Shipup is a 50+ people company that envisions a world where brands keep their promises along the entire customer journey.

That’s why we enable brands to take control over the most volatile part of the customer experience —the post-purchase— so they increase brand loyalty and save support costs

📕 Who we are

At Shipup, we enjoy working with humble engineers who seek to work in a learning, collaborative and friendly environment.

Our developers come from diverse education backgrounds and know how to use & adapt their tools according to the challenges. They do care and are proud of how they do their stuff but also why.

They enjoy contributing to the company & product activities that allow them to make an impact beyond the code itself.

You can find all the principles they believe in here.

📝 Context

Following a horizontal move of the person responsible for technical leadership of our backend & infrastructure, we’re hiring a Senior Staff Engineer (Back-end & Infrastructure) to assume these crucial responsibilities.

🛍 As a Senior Staff Engineer (Back-end & Infrastructure) @Shipup

This critical role will have a significant impact on the entire product, focusing on the areas most crucial for our business’s success. As a key leadership position, this role will also set the standard for behaviors and expectations within the team on the backend and infrastructure side.

Your main mission will be to ensure the development, reliability, and scalability of the backend systems and infrastructure to support the organization’s growth.

Here are some of the key responsibilities :

• Play a pivotal role among the other technical leader members, in developing a coherent technology strategy that aligns with the organization’s overall goals and product priorities.

• Ensure that architectural decisions for key product initiatives are in harmony with their objectives.

• Ensure service reliability: Managing incidents, setting & measuring service level objectives, maintaining & evolving recovering plans, evolving application observability & monitoring

• Oversee and optimize our cloud infrastructure, ensuring resource allocation is balanced, especially during high-peak periods like Black Friday.

• Actively participate in refining engineering processes such as continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) and code reviews to enhance team productivity, and efficiency, and elevate product quality and security

A few specific things that you could work on (not an exhaustive list)

• Evaluating relevance to switch from a worker-based approach to an event-driven one

• Improving our staging environment to make it closer to our production environment

• Re-evaluating our on-call policy & playbook

• Pairing with squad developers on day to day product work to share knowledge & practices

• Framing (or help framing) tech & product initiatives

• Jumping onto sudden problems that can harm the business

• Discuss with the customer success team the technical limitations that make some use cases difficult to address.

Please be aware that this role will involve a significant hands-on commitment, approximately 70% of your time.

🙌 Our team

You will join the Tech & Product team, which consists of eighteen people led by Léa (CPTO) and Florian (VP of Engineering).

This team is divided into two squads and transversal members.

• Online-shopper perceived value: this squad has the ownership of all features that are directly dedicated to end-customers. Squad members will focus on features for which the benefits are mainly perceived by / or directed towards the latter.

• Merchant perceived value : this squad has the ownership of all features that benefit directly the Merchants. Squad members will focus on providing our merchant’s operations and CS teams with the tools and resources they need to be successful.

In each squad, we have:

• 1 Engineering Manager and 4 full-stack developers

• 1 Product Manager

• 1 Product Designer

Our transversal members are:

• 1 Head of Data

• 1 Lead Product Manager

• 1 Product Marketing Manager

• 1 Staff Front-End Engineer

You can learn more about our internal organization, technical challenges, methods and approaches thanks to our internal blog and engineering page.

👩‍💻 Our stack

Tech

• Ruby on Rails mainly with some Go for backend

• TypeScript, React (with Hooks), Redux, React Testing Library, CSS Modules, Webpack (with federated modules) for frontend

• Hosted on GCP

• Datadog, LogDNA, Sentry for monitoring

• A scalable monolith with some additional microservices

• PostgreSQL + Elasticsearch + RabbitMQ + Redis for storage

• Kubernetes + Docker for ops

Global

• Asana, project management tool

• Metabase, business intelligence platform

• Slack, messaging platform

• Notion, collaboration platform

• PayFit, payroll & compliance for french talents

• Lattice, people success platform

• Deel, payroll & compliance for international talents

Your manager responsibilities

Florian joined Shipup in September 2021 as our first VP of Engineering to ensure we deliver at a constant pace and with high quality. His duties largely involve methodologies and people-related topics. Additionally, his role is to centralize information to maintain consistency and ensure the tech team meets business needs.

He is used to discussing and challenging your topics, as we have always had this strong tandem collaboration since his beginning.

During your first year, as a hiring manager, he primarily expects you to:

• Provide input & drive valuable, impactful changes to the current architecture & infrastructure

• Became naturally the go-to person for the team when it comes to discussing challenging technical choices to be made

• Set the standard of excellence for the backend side