Senior Staff Engineer, Bulk Data Management

Company Description

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

Job Description

As a Senior Staff Engineer for our Bulk Import/Export and Snapshot/Restore mission, you’ll oversee the technical design of our new bulk import/export primitives and their extension to 1st and 3rd party solutions in a variety of use cases, while working with multiple teams and disciplines across Shopify. You will drive vision through to implementation, including technical design and  hands-on development of high quality code. Additionally, you will contribute to creating and fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge, as a mentor to other engineers. 

Intrigued? Here’s more information about the problem space and the role.

Bulk Data Management

Increasingly, our merchants and partners are looking for highly-performant, and easy-to-use solutions for managing their bulk commerce data.  Our largest merchants have stores with millions of products, customers, and orders.    We’re investing in new primitives and solutions in this space in order to support our merchants and partners with their bulk data management needs at scale.   Broadly speaking, Bulk Data Management in this context includes but is not limited to efficiently importing commerce data into a new or existing store (and reconciling any differences), exporting data to and/or syncing with 3rd-party systems, pre-populating test stores, empowering app developers with better import/export primitives, and enabling merchants to version and manage drafts of changes to their stores.

At Shopify, we hire Engineers with a passion for solving tough problems with performant code work on teams that ship on quality instead of on time. Our teams deploy new code many times a day, and our production scale is massive. We’re talking millions of online stores, and hundreds of millions of requests a day. Thousands of entrepreneurs will see your work within seconds – a difficult but incredibly rewarding responsibility. Shopify is the largest Ruby on Rails application in the world and we're a big part of the Rails community. We’re constantly improving our codebase to make it even better.

What you’ll do as a Senior Tech Lead 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 & API
• 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

Qualifications

• A proven track record of strong technical mentorship and influencing the technical direction for sizeable technical organizations is a must
• 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 like (but not limited to) Ruby on Rails & GraphQL - or deep experience with any object-oriented language and relevant transferable technologies
• Experience with bulk data management using SQL and ORMs (eg: ActiveRecord)
• Fluency with version control system design concepts and best practices
• Experience with ETL concepts and technology, including techniques in efficient data transformation
• Familiarity with Google Cloud Platform data storage 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

Additional Information

We know that looking for a new role can be both exciting and time-consuming, and we truly appreciate your effort. And remember, we want to know what you’re really interested in building and why you want to build it at Shopify, so please give us as much detail on this as you’d like in the answers on the next page. 👍 📖

#LI-KO3 #LI-REMOTE #LI-AH1

Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity & inclusion enables us to truly make commerce better for everyone. We encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities, and/or people with intersectional identities. Please take a look at our Sustainability Reports to learn more about Shopify’s commitments to our communities, and our planet.

At Shopify, we understand that experience comes in many forms. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team - so if your experience is this close to what we’re looking for, please consider applying.