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Senior Staff Engineer, Frontend - Checkout

  • Americas
  • 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.

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
  • Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
  • Work digital-first for your daily work

About the role

In the Checkout team, Senior Tech Lead Engineers (also referred to as Senior Staff Engineers) use their expertise and passion to multiply the overall output of the team and work with many teams across Shopify to influence the direction of our product and codebase. As a senior technical leader, you'll help drive the product vision to its implementation. You and the team will design and build technically innovative solutions that empower all teams at Shopify to build amazing new features into Shopify’s Checkout. Merchants that depend on Shopify for a highly scalable, performant, and reliable platform benefit directly from the work you do. You will maintain a high bar for quality and lead and mentor other engineers. And of course, you'll be hands-on in the code and contribute technically. Here are just some of the stories from the teams who build and scale Shopify. Checkout is the core of Shopify. Checkout is Shopify. And the impact you will have by working on the widest used Checkout in the world will be massive.

What does Front End Development mean at Shopify?
Our Front End Engineers collaborate closely with software engineering teams, designers, product managers, and marketers to not only build incredible merchant-facing products and marketing campaigns, but also engineer-facing tools. You'll use the latest web standards in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and modern technologies and frameworks like Typescript, React, GraphQL, Apollo and Ruby on Rails, to develop large front-end web applications and websites that scale and perform well on all devices. You'll work across disciplines and are excited about building human-centered experiences. Front End Development exists across all of Shopify, from Product to Marketing, working closely with the teams that create performant experiences and communicate Shopify's impact on commerce to a global audience. You may also collaborate with our Data and SEO teams, helping us make data informed decisions and driving additional new merchant acquisition. You might focus on creating thoughtful interfaces for our users, shaping our design language, and contributing to our shared component libraries in a maintainable and scalable way.
 

Qualifications

What you'll do as a Senior Tech Lead Frontend Software 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

A Senior Tech Lead at Shopify typically has 10+ years of experience as a developer.
Experience and skills that are important for success in this role:
A proven track record of strong technical mentorship
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 and frameworks like (but not limited to) some of our most-used languages - Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, Java/JEE, Node.js, Javascript, React or React Native - or deep experience with any relevant transferrable 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
 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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. 👍 📖

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.


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

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.

Ben Cox
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

We hire people, not resumes. If you think you’re right for the role, apply now.

First things first

We want to ensure you’re the type of person who will thrive here so we can move you quickly through our hiring process. Before completing the job application, please check all the statements that apply to you below:

It looks like you might not be a great fit for Shopify at this time- while we encourge everyone to apply, we are looking for someone who can meet all these criteria.

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Personal Information

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