Principal Engineer

We’re not solving a small problem, and we’re not addressing a small market. We’re tackling returns—the part of the online shopping experience shoppers say they hate most. Our customers, i.e., top online retailers, use Happy Returns’ returns software and reverse logistics to offer shoppers a genuinely delightful return experience while at the same time reducing costs, retaining sales, and making their supply chains more sustainable. We’re making returns legitimately better for everyone, and we’re having fun doing it.

Your day to day

• Plan an architectural path for the engineering organization to enable our systems to scale 100x in an iterative manner.
• Work with Product Managers and Engineering Managers to determine the feasibility of product features and recommend simpler more efficient solutions to meet business needs.
• Establish best practices when it comes to designing services and work with the technical leaders to ensure teams are adhering to the practices.
• Proactively improve our system security and evaluate concerns around PII, data access, and system usage.
• Improve the operations of our database and work with technical leaders to optimize inefficiency within views, queries, and data design.
• Work with technical leaders to improve the observability of our system through our various monitoring systems.
• Enforce clean code and excellent coding practices by conducting thoughtful code reviews for critical areas of the system.

What you need to bring

• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills
• A minimum of 1 year of experience as a principal engineer working with large-scale distributed enterprise systems or at least 2 years of experience as a technical lead or team lead.
• Over 10 years of experience developing and testing SaaS services.
• Demonstrated ability to lead a group of technical leaders and raise the bar of technical excellence across the engineering organization.
• Demonstrated ability to optimize and tune large-scale databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB).
• A strong interest in joining a highly collaborative environment and working daily with Developers, Product Managers, and DevOps Engineers.
• Demonstrated ability to scale systems in an iterative approach with quantifiable results.

Bonus points if you have

• Demonstrable SRE knowledge and have worked with teams to establish best practices around SRE concepts.
• Expertise in security mitigation and prevention within enterprise systems.
• Expert-level knowledge with an observability platform and creating effective monitoring solutions.
• Strong interest in e-commerce, logistics, and/or sustainability.