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

Job description

📕 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

What you have...

You could be a good fit if

• You have an extensive experience in architecture and infrastructure within a cloud environment
• You have a strong understanding of Ruby & Ruby on Rails 
• You demonstrated leadership skills with a history of setting high standards for team behaviors and performance
• You are able to balance between operational and strategic levels
• You have expertise in managing cloud-based infrastructure and related technologies, focusing on scalability and reliability. You have developed a strong aptitude for calmly handling various incidents of various types and impacts.
• A keen interest in sharing knowledge, staying curious, and keeping up-to-date with industry novelties

This role offers a unique opportunity to influence the direction and success of our product and tech team significantly. If you are passionate about leading backend and infrastructure efforts in a dynamic and growing environment, we would love to hear from you.

What you’ll get…

🌍 International : we acknowledge our differences and celebrate them. D&I in our place of work is something we require every employee to champion.

🧸 People-centric company : our people matter, work-life balance is important at Shipup. Our employees talk about it here.

🗃 Startup spirit & structured environment : a fast-paced environment, where there is a lot to learn but, at the same time, you are in a mature, organized environment with a clear product and technical vision

📚 Career growth : talent management is essential for us. From onboarding and performance management to career development, we have already a mature organization and the managers to help you grow

🧠 Seniority : our tech and product team is mostly composed of senior talents, ideal for learning and growing quickly

💻 High-quality equipment: latest Macbook Pro or equivalent

Recruitment process

Our hiring process is structured to avoid bias and ensure fair assessment of all our candidates. 
Our interviews are suited to our flex remote policy, it means you can choose whether you want to attend them on-site or remotely. 

STEP 1 

☎️ 45min l Screening interview with Florian, our VP of Engineering
To learn more from each other and confirm a shared interest in broad terms

STEP 2

👀 01:00 l Focused interview (live-coding interview - API)
To get a quick overview of your coding skills

👀 01:00 l Focused interview (system design)
To assess your architectural and critical thinking skills

👀 01:00 l Focused interview (incident roleplay)
To assess your ability to identify and handle incidents

STEP 3

🤝 01:30 l Top grading interview with Florian & Julien, our Staff Front-end
To evaluate your leadership skills

STEP 4

😂 Drinks or lunch with the team
To ensure that you will be in line with our values and culture

🕵️ Reference check
We’ll check in with two references, one of which a manager, to better understand how to support you in this new role.

End notes

If you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications outlined above - that’s okay, nobody’s perfect! We believe in hiring people, not just skills. We encourage you to apply if you think this is a role that would make you excited to come to work every day.

Shipup is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.