Senior Software Engineer — Commerce Platform (Payments, Billing & Fulfillment)

About the Company

We're a direct-to-consumer subscription-commerce company in the beauty space, serving millions of subscribers. Our engineering team builds and operates the production systems that charge those customers correctly, manage their subscriptions, assign the right products, and get boxes shipped on time — every billing cycle, at scale. We value sound architecture, continuous delivery, deep observability, and thoughtful, hands-on use of AI.

About the Team & What You'll Own

This role sits on the team that owns the commercial backbone of the business:

• Payments — payment processing via Stripe
• Billing & subscriptions — recurring billing and subscription lifecycle via Recurly, including renewals
• Fulfillment — SKU assignment and shipment orchestration
• Identity — the authentication stack (Keycloak)

These are high-correctness, high-availability systems running at the scale of millions of recurring billing and fulfillment events. When they fail, customers get charged incorrectly or boxes don't ship — so reliability, idempotency, and recoverability aren't nice-to-haves, they're the job.

Tech Environment

• Backend: Java + Spring Boot
• Data & events: MySQL, Kafka (event-driven architecture)
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes (EKS)
• Observability: Datadog
• Commerce: Stripe (payments), Recurly (billing/subscriptions)
• Identity: Keycloak (OAuth/OIDC)
• Internal tooling: a React-based admin / customer-support application

About the Role

As a Senior-to-Staff engineer, you'll contribute well beyond ticket execution. You'll ship clean, performant backend code, shape the architectural direction for the payment, billing, subscription, fulfillment, and identity systems you own, and influence the broader platform through code review, tooling, and engineering standards. The role carries real leadership scope: mentoring engineers, bringing clarity to technical decisions, and helping the team build strong judgment about where AI accelerates work, where it needs oversight, and where human ownership matters most.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

Technical Work — 60%

• Develop and deliver clean, maintainable, performant backend services in Java / Spring Boot
• Define the architectural strategy for the systems you own (payments, billing, subscriptions, fulfillment, identity) and contribute to platform-wide architectural vision
• Design event-driven workflows on Kafka with a focus on idempotency, correctness, and recoverability — money movement and renewals can't silently fail
• Review code and raise the bar on technical quality across the team
• Build services and tooling that streamline development and operations
• Contribute to the React admin / CS tooling when the work calls for it
• Work fluidly across the human–AI spectrum — from AI-assisted coding to delegating multi-step tasks to AI agents — and know when to steer, when to verify, and when to take back control; help the team develop that same judgment

Leadership & Collaboration — 20%

• Mentor and coach less experienced engineers
• Help define standards and best practices for testing, software delivery, observability (Datadog), and contract/API definition
• Participate in sprint ceremonies: standup, grooming, retrospective, roadmap replenishment

Strategy & Advocacy — 20%

• Encourage a culture of experimentation, prototyping, and brainstorming across technical teams
• Provide consultation for non-technical teammates (CS, operations, finance) and clarity around technical decisions
• Advocate for new technology and design patterns where they can power the business
• Advocate for flexible, domain-driven solutions that balance expediency with long-term flexibility

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• 6+ years building and operating production backend systems at scale (Senior to Staff level)
• Strong Java + Spring Boot (or a very close JVM equivalent)
• Event-driven / distributed systems experience — Kafka or comparable
• Comfortable operating in AWS + Kubernetes (EKS)
• A track record of automation and observability — systems that run unattended for long stretches and are debuggable up and down the stack
• A continuous-delivery mindset — small, frequent, safe deployments
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI agents — you understand where to keep humans in the loop, what failure modes to design for, and how to structure tasks so AI operates reliably. You treat AI as a collaborator you critically evaluate; your review of AI-produced code is as rigorous as your review of a colleague's PR. You've helped a team level up its AI fluency — modeling judgment of when to trust AI output, when to question it, and when the right answer is to do it yourself.

Strongly preferred

• Domain experience in payments, billing, subscriptions, or fulfillment (Stripe, Recurly, or comparable platforms)
• Ecommerce or subscription-commerce background
• Identity / auth experience (Keycloak, OAuth/OIDC)

Nice to have

• React (for the admin / CS tooling)
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field

Things You've Done

• Designed, built, and operated domain-driven backend systems at scale
• Worked in agile, kanban, and hybrid delivery models
• Tuned observability up and down the stack
• Demystified complex technical concepts for non-technical teammates
• Found the growth edge for the people on your team — and for yourself