Software Engineer (API, SQL)

**About The Company** Shippo is a leading technology company dedicated to transforming the logistics and shipping landscape for global e-commerce. Our vision is to be the shipping layer of the internet, providing merchants with seamless, reliable, and scalable shipping solutions. We aim to empower businesses of all sizes by offering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure through a unified API and an intuitive dashboard. As a remote-first and globally distributed team, we foster an environment of flexibility, trust, and innovation. Our diverse team spans multiple continents, cultures, and time zones, driving our commitment to building inclusive and forward-thinking solutions. We invest heavily in modern, scalable technology stacks to enable our teams to build, ship, and iterate confidently. At Shippo, every team member plays a vital role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and simplifies shipping for businesses worldwide. **About The Role** We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead our Platform Enablement organization, which includes Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Engineering Enablement (Developer Experience), and Security teams. This strategic, high-visibility role will be instrumental in defining and executing the technical strategy and architecture for our platform capabilities. You will be responsible for establishing architectural guardrails, governance frameworks, and standards that enable rapid development while maintaining security and reliability. Your expertise will help design complex systems involving cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and security tooling, ensuring consistency and operational excellence across the organization. You will collaborate closely with engineering leadership, mentor senior engineers, and influence organizational culture toward best practices. Your work will directly impact hundreds of engineers, improving developer velocity, cost efficiency, and security posture. The role offers a unique opportunity to shape the long-term technical direction of Shippo’s platform, balancing trade-offs and driving innovative solutions that scale with our growth. **Qualifications** - 12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in platform engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure - Strong hands-on software development skills, including writing production-quality code, prototyping, and developing internal tooling and libraries - Proven experience leading multi-year, organization-wide technical initiatives at high-growth technology companies - Hands-on experience with cloud cost optimization, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) - Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, or improving engineering productivity at scale - Ability to define technical strategy aligned with business objectives and anticipate industry trends - Track record of building consensus among engineering leadership on complex architectural decisions - Experience establishing scalable engineering standards and governance frameworks - Proven mentoring skills for senior technical talent and influencing career growth - Excellent judgment in navigating trade-offs between cost, security, velocity, and technical debt - Strong communication skills, capable of translating technical concepts for diverse audiences - Comfortable working with ambiguity, investigating solutions, and prototyping before broad implementation - Data-driven decision-making skills with analytical acumen - Experience collaborating effectively with product, security, and engineering leadership teams - Participation in hiring processes with a focus on technical excellence - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience **Responsibilities** - Define and execute the multi-year technical strategy for Shippo’s platform capabilities, including cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and security - Establish architectural guardrails and governance frameworks to enable rapid yet secure and reliable development - Design high-level systems to address complex problems involving cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and security tooling - Partner with staff engineers and cross-functional teams to ensure clear ownership, system boundaries, and operational health - Develop and enforce engineering standards for infrastructure, deployment practices, and security by default - Create organizational mechanisms such as templates, service catalogs, and automated guardrails to promote excellence without micromanagement - Drive application standards through self-service tooling and golden paths, reducing platform fragmentation - Identify and eliminate systemic organizational barriers that hinder engineering velocity or create toil - Design solutions that maximize organizational impact, including cost optimization, security automation, and developer productivity enhancements - Conduct early-stage investigation, prototyping, and experimentation to validate approaches before scaling - Mentor and influence the career growth of senior and staff engineers within platform teams - Navigate complex trade-offs with company-wide implications, advocating for balanced decisions - Collaborate with Security teams to embed automation and secure-by-default practices into workflows - Drive ownership and transparency for platform service costs consumed by product teams - Maintain close feedback loops with product teams to ensure platform capabilities meet their needs - Lead proactive reviews of operational and system health across platform services - Produce reusable artifacts such as documentation, frameworks, and talks to serve as organizational force multipliers - Allocate approximately 30% of time to shipping code, prototyping, libraries, and tooling; 70% to reviewing designs, standards, and strategic initiatives **Benefits** - Healthcare coverage for medical, dental, and vision plans, with 90% covered by the company, including dependents - Pet coverage options available - Flexible take-as-much-as-you-need vacation policy and remote work flexibility - One-week company-wide winter slowdown to recharge - Home office setup stipend to support remote work - Charity donation **Equal Opportunity** Shippo is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or any other protected status. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to these factors.