Senior Staff Engineer, Checkout - Frontend

About Shopify

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 10,000 employees and generated over $500 billion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. Every 28 seconds, an entrepreneur on Shopify makes their first sale.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About you

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion — and embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
• Work digital-first for your daily work

In the Checkout team, Senior Tech Lead Engineers (also referred to as Senior Staff Engineers) use their expertise and passion to multiply the overall output of the team and work with many teams across Shopify to influence the direction of our product and codebase.

As a Senior Technical Leader, you'll help drive the product vision to its implementation. You and the team will design and build technically innovative solutions that empower all teams at Shopify to build amazing new features into Shopify’s Checkout. Merchants that depend on Shopify for a highly scalable, performant, and reliable platform benefit directly from the work you do. You will maintain a high bar for quality and lead and mentor other engineers. And of course, you'll be hands-on in the code and contribute technically.

What does Front End Development mean at Shopify?
Our Front End Engineers collaborate closely with software engineering teams, designers, product managers, and marketers to not only build incredible merchant-facing products and marketing campaigns, but also engineer-facing tools. You'll use the latest web standards in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and modern technologies and frameworks like Typescript, React, GraphQL, Apollo and Ruby on Rails, to develop large front-end web applications and websites that scale and perform well on all devices. You'll work across disciplines and are excited about building human-centered experiences. Front End Development exists across all of Shopify, from Product to Marketing, working closely with the teams that create performant experiences and communicate Shopify's impact on commerce to a global audience. You may also collaborate with our Data and SEO teams, helping us make data informed decisions and driving additional new merchant acquisition. You might focus on creating thoughtful interfaces for our users, shaping our design language, and contributing to our shared component libraries in a maintainable and scalable way.

What you'll do as a Senior Tech Lead Frontend Software Engineer at Shopify:

• Learn and grow constantly to feed your passion for self-improvement and make those around you better
• Design and build highly available, resilient and scalable platform primitives & APIs
• Work through problems with your team, roll up your sleeves, form an opinion and advocate for engineering-specific roadmap items
• Collaborate with other Shopify leaders, executives and external partners to provide the best commerce experience for our merchants

• A proven track record of strong technical mentorship
• Experience building large scale, high throughput distributed systems and scaling web services, particularly those using and analyzing large amounts of data
• High level of fluency with and experience using technologies and frameworks like (but not limited to) some of our most-used languages - Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, Java/JEE, Node.js, Javascript, React or React Native - or deep experience with any relevant transferrable technologies
• A passion for efficiency and collaboration, with a history of establishing great relationships with UX and Product Management teams across time zones
• A commitment and drive for quality, technical excellence and results
• Curiosity and passion to constantly learn new things; Shopify changes fast, and we need the people who work here to be able to change and learn fast too
• Proficiency in systems thinking and systems design concepts like transactions, atomicity, idempotency, etc.
• Raise the quality and speed (team efficiency) bar and move the platform into a position of maximum leverage
• Use the right tool for the job, fix problems are the right level of abstraction and optimize to meet both functional and non-functional goals