Staff Software Engineer (Marketplace)
Posted Updated
- You are hiring into the Staff Software Engineer role on Zipline’s Marketplace team
- This team builds the commercial engine that turns Zipline’s delivery network into a scalable business: merchant-facing portals and integrations, marketplace policy and dispatch logic, fulfillment tooling at partner locations, and the billing/settlements backbone that must be financially correct across promotions, refunds, revenue shares, and taxes
- These systems run live against real missions—affecting partner operations, customer experience, and cashflow—and must operate across metros and countries with strict safety, reliability, and financial correctness constraints
- This hire will be an owner/operator: shipping core services, owning production reliability and incident response, and moving product and architecture forward in a regulated, hardware-integrated logistics environment. Role may require multi-day travel to partner sites and occasional weekend or evening production support during launches
- Own one or more production services end-to-end in the commerce stack (merchant portal, partner integrations, marketplace platform, billing engine, fulfillment apps, or support tooling), including design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations
- Deliver measurable improvements, such as reducing merchant onboarding time by 50% within 6 months for assigned flows, bringing reconciliation variance below 0.1% month-over-month for owned payment paths, and reducing incident-driven customer-impacting downtime to under 30 minutes MTTR for priority services
- Lead cross-functional launches by defining success criteria, authoring rollout and rollback plans, coordinating with Field Operations, Safety/Compliance, Product, and Finance, and owning post-launch remediation and success metrics
- Build and enforce marketplace controls and policy tooling that enable operators to safely manage pricing, capacity allocation, and prioritization, including feature gates, experiment scaffolding, and pre-production simulation using historical mission data
- Ship partner integrations (POS connectors, APIs, and data feeds) with clear SLAs, backpressure handling, and schema/version migration strategies, while serving as the technical lead for critical partner onboarding and incident response
- Maintain observability and service reliability by defining SLOs, building monitoring and dashboards (Grafana/Honeycomb), and owning alerting thresholds, runbooks, and on-call rotations for assigned services
- Mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and make durable abstraction decisions that reduce cross-product fragmentation
- Operating intensity and logistics: able to support occasional off-hours launches and urgent production incidents; available for regular multi-day travel to partner sites (up to ~20% travel typical); preferred to be based near the primary office for hybrid work and rapid cross-functional coordination
- Strong systems skills: production-grade API design, data modelling for ledgers, eventual consistency tradeoffs, schema migrations, and designing for idempotency and retry semantics
- Tech stack experience: deep proficiency in one or more of Go, Python, or scalable backend languages; experience with React or similar for merchant-facing apps; familiarity with Kafka, gRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, observability tools (Grafana, Honeycomb), and build tooling (Bazel) is required for day-one productivity
- Measured outcomes orientation: able to define and hit specific metrics (reconciliation accuracy, onboarding time, MTTR, throughput/latency targets) and to present trade-offs with data
- Must-have traits: rigorous attention to correctness and edge-cases in financial flows, clear bias for measurable ownership and accountability, ability to simplify complex cross-boundary systems into durable abstractions
- Must have shipped transactional commerce, payments, billing, or marketplace systems in production at scale (millions of orders/day or multi-region transactional volume), or equivalent experience operating financial reconciliation and settlements pipelines
- Minimum 5+ years building and shipping production distributed systems and web applications; evidence of ownership across frontend, backend, and data/streaming pipelines
- Demonstrated incident leadership: on-call experience, runbook authorship, performing post-incident root-cause analysis, and driving remediation to prevent recurrence