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Posted 4 months ago
Requirements and responsibilities
About ShippoAt Shippo, our vision is bold and clear: we are the shipping layer of the internet. Our mission is to make every merchant successful through excellent shipping, delivering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure. We’re building the backbone of global e-commerce — connecting merchants to carriers worldwide through a single API and intuitive dashboard.As a remote-first and globally distributed team, we believe flexibility fuels trust, autonomy, and performance. Our diverse perspectives — across continents, cultures, and time zones — drive our innovation and enable us to build solutions used by businesses everywhere. We invest in modern, scalable technology so our teams can build, ship, and iterate with confidence.Your impact starts here: every person at Shippo plays a direct role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and makes shipping simpler for businesses around the world.How we will deliver success together: Shippo is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead our Platform Enablement organization, which encompasses Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Engineering Enablement (Developer Experience), and Security teams. This is a highly visible, strategic role that will shape how hundreds of engineers build, deploy, and operate software at Shippo. You will own the technical strategy and architecture for our platform capabilities, driving consistency across our infrastructure while accelerating product team velocity. As a Principal Engineer, you'll balance deep technical work (prototyping, building critical tooling) with broad organizational influence (architecture decisions, mentoring senior engineers, establishing standards). You'll navigate complex trade-offs between cloud cost optimization, security hardening, and developer velocity. This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is a key role in driving engineering culture and technical direction across the organization.Shipping & handling responsibilitiesDefine and drive the multi-year technical strategy for Shippo's platform capabilities across cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and securityEstablish architectural guardrails and governance frameworks that enable teams to move fast while maintaining security and reliabilityDesign high-level systems that solve significantly complex problems involving cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and security toolingPartner with Staff Engineers across Engineering to ensure clear ownership, system boundaries, and operational healthEstablish company-wide engineering standards for infrastructure, deployment practices, and security by defaultCreate organizational mechanisms (templates, service catalogs, automated guardrails) that ensure teams maintain excellence without requiring direct oversightDrive stronger application standards through self-service tooling and golden paths; reduce platform fragmentation and prevent siloed solutionsIdentify and eliminate systemic organizational barriers that slow engineering velocity or create toilDesign and deliver solutions that maximize impact across the organization - from cost optimization to security automation to developer productivityConduct early investigation, prototyping, and experimentation to validate approaches before scaling across teamsMentor and influence the career growth of Senior and Staff Engineers across platform teamsNavigate complex trade-offs (cost vs. security vs. velocity) with company-wide implications and drive adoption of difficult decisionsPartner with Security team to drive automation and secure-by-default practices into engineering workflowsDrive ownership and cost transparency for platform services that product teams consumeMaintain tight feedback loops with product teams to ensure platform capabilities directly address pain pointsLead proactive reviews of operational and system health across platform servicesProduce long-lasting artifacts (talks, documentation, frameworks) that serve as force multipliers for the organizationTypically split time between shipping code, prototyping, libraries, and tooling (30%) and driving designs and standards in reviews (70%)Your shipping requirements12+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in platform engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructureStrong hands-on software development skills with the ability to write production-quality code, build prototypes, and develop internal tooling and librariesProven track record leading multi-year, org-wide technical initiatives at high-growth technology companiesHands-on experience with cloud cost optimization, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and/or container orchestration (Kubernetes)Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, or improving engineering productivity at scaleDemonstrated ability to define technical strategy that aligns with business objectives and anticipate industry changesTrack record of building consensus across engineering leadership on complex architectural decisionsExperience establishing engineering standards and/or governance frameworks that scaleProven ability to mentor senior technical talent and influence career growthExcellent judgment in navigating trade-offs between competing priorities (cost, security, velocity, technical debt)Strong communication skills - able to translate complex technical concepts for both technical and non-technical audiencesComfortable with ambiguity - able to investigate, analyze, and prototype solutions before committing to broad rolloutsStrong analytical and data-driven decision making skillsProven ability to build trust and collaborate effectively with product teams, security teams, and engineering leadershipTrack record of driving engineering culture improvements and best practices adoptionExperience participating in hiring processes with a strong bar for technical excellenceBS or MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent experienceBonusExperience at companies with SaaS, e-commerce, or logistics platformsBackground in both application development and platform/infrastructure engineeringStrong cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with demonstrated ability to balance cost, security, and developer experienceWorking knowledge of security practices, compliance requirements, and secure-by-default architecture patternsContributions to open source projects or engineering community (talks, blog posts, frameworks)Experience with usage-based infrastructure or multi-tenant platform architecturesPrior experience in startup or high-growth environmentsExperience with service meshes (e.g. Istio)Familiarity with configuration and maintenance of common infrastructure components such as Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, and HadoopExperience with observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, SumoLogic, etc.)3+ years of experience in software developmentWhat is in the Shippo Package?Healthcare coverage for medical, dental, and vision (90% covered by the company, incl. dependents). Pets coverage is also available!Take-as-much-as-you-need vacation policy & flexible workingOne week-long company wide winter slow down3 Volunteer Days Off (VTOs)WFH stipend to set up your home officeCharity donation match up to $100Dedicated programs, coaching, tools, and resources for your professional and career growth as well as an individual learning stipend for your personal and focused growthFun team in person time through our Shippos Everywhere program which includes regular team and company off-sites throughout the year as well as local Shippos gatheringsCompensationOur Compensation Ship policy: We believe compensation is a custom experience and are commited to fair and equitable compensation practices. The standard base pay range for this role is min is $212k to a max $287k annual salary (we tend to anchor our offers at the mid point $250k). Since we are focused on hiring Shippos Everywhere, we have 2 US pay ranges, a standard compensation range for the majority of the US and a standard +1 compensation range for those who live in areas where the cost of labor is higher, such as NYC and California.The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: financial budgets, work experience, training, transferable skills, business needs, and market value. The base pay salary ranges are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Total compensation for this role will include, equity, medical, dental, vision and other benefits noted in our Shippos “package” section.Sail through the process: Here at Shippo, we celebrate inclusivity and are committed to creating equal access to opportunities for people from all backgrounds, perspectives and geographies. These values define who we are and everything we do. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance, or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please contact us at accommodations@goshippo.comShippos in the wild:Our people, much like the packages we help ship, are all over the world. This means, through our remote-first program, “Shippos Everywhere”, our roles can be based anywhere in the US with the exception of Delaware, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia and many roles can be based internationally.For locations outside of the US and Ireland, the employment contracts are powered by Remote.com (all Shippo perks still apply - including equity!). What we want to emphasize is that you can be successful at Shippo regardless of location.
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