Senior Staff Engineer, Discovery Experience
- EMEA
- Engineering & Data
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 $496 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.
- 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
- Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
- Work digital-first for your daily work
About the role
The Discovery Experience team is part of Shopify’s core product team, whose mission is to build the world’s best Online Store, Checkout and Admin to set up and run a business. The team’s role is to help merchants sell by effortlessly surfacing compelling products to buyers. We build, scale and improve search and discovery experiences across many surfaces, including the Online Store. The role uniquely blends data science and engineering to unlock the full potential of our data at planetary scale.
The Senior Staff Engineer will own projects whose scope impacts multiple disciplines and domains at Shopify. Whether it be search, product recommendations, typeahead suggestions or product collection filtering and sorting, the Discovery Experience team owns the data, the systems and the experience end-to-end.
We are looking to add more discovery experts to our team! Do you have experience building search & recommendation systems? We’d love to talk to you.
Projects you could work on:
- Using various data building blocks to surface relevant products to buyers in real-time. (Elasticsearch, MySQL, Redis, Bigtable)
- Continuously improve our serving layer to achieve planetary scale (Ruby)
- Evolve our infrastructure to account for buyer intent wherever products are shown
- Ensure we capture the right data throughout the stack to improve on our query’s performance and quality
- Acting as a technical leader for the team and a mentor to other developers
Qualifications
- Proficiency in one or more of Ruby, Kotlin/Java or Python.
- Interest or experience with one or more of the following types of systems:
- Full-text search systems (Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene, or similar),
- Streaming systems (Kafka, Flink, Beam, etc.), or
- Other distributed systems/databases
- Experience designing, building, and maintaining complex systems at scale
- A passion and curiosity for data products, the world of commerce, or both
- Strong programming foundations (we use a lot of Ruby and Kotlin, but we believe that good programmers can work in any language)
- Enthusiasm for remote collaboration (our team is distributed!)
- A commitment and drive for quality, technical excellence and results.
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.
The shape of a Shopify career
Ben joined Shopify as a frontline Support Advisor with no background in programming or computer science. He’s now a Director of Engineering. Spanning 10 jobs on 7 teams in 9 years, Ben’s Shopify career path has twisted and turned as he’s worked relentlessly to pursue a career as an engineer and adapted to the pace of change—all fuelled by personal and professional hypergrowth.
Our mission as a company is to spread entrepreneurship and help individuals become their own bosses and take control over their lives. I truly believe this mission and value in extreme personal growth and development extends to what’s expected as a Shopifolk. Shopify doesn’t like to tell people what to do. Not only is your career in your own hands, a lot of your day-to-day is too, which can be jarring for many people. To thrive here, you need to be someone who’s willing to take big bets on yourself and figure things out on your own.
Director, Support & CX Engineering
Ben’s growth trajectory
2014-2016
- A support advisor for 2 years
- Studied dev skills. Learnt about our API. Became first API support person. Found bugs to fix.
- Eventually became a software dev
2017-2019
- Helped launch first finance product for merchants
- Became senior dev and launched new support contact centre
- Led a team as a dev manager
2020-2022
- Scaled a team from 4 to 60+ as a senior dev manager
- Became Director for Support and CX Engineering