[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @Dept

Role Description

As a Senior Engineer, you own significant portions of a project and drive them to completion. You take a semi-defined problem, ask the questions that sharpen it, turn it into a plan, and ship it. You're past the stage of needing fully specified tasks handed to you, and you're building the judgment to know which task matters most.

You're comfortable working alongside product managers, engineers, marketing, sales, and finance, and you can explain your work to any of them without retreating into jargon. Most of what we build depends on getting those people to a shared understanding of what's being made and why.

This role is primarily backend focused, occasionally diving into cloud infrastructure. However, you should also be comfortable enough in a modern frontend codebase to apply best practices and create something visually appealing and smooth to use.

What you'll do

• Build and deploy scalable backend services and APIs for global brands, taking high ownership of your workstreams and their dependencies.
• Take specs that are incomplete or ambiguous, resolve the open questions, and turn them into clear requirements, tasks, and stories with time-to-complete estimates people can plan around.
• Participate in technical design of systems, schemas, and pipelines, and offer sound guidance on architecture and infrastructure decisions.
• Integrate third-party APIs and systems, and design the contracts that frontend teams and other services build against.
• Perform code reviews that raise the bar, both submitting your own work and giving constructive feedback that makes your teammates better.
• Surface technical blockers, risks, and client-facing issues early enough for the team to course-correct.
• Advocate for best practices in testing, security, performance, and CI/CD, and encourage others to do the same.
• Work directly with working-level client stakeholders over email, on calls, and in person, and start building demo and presentation content of your own.
• Apply AI and agentic capabilities to real client work, and contribute back to how the craft adopts them through reusable templates, prototyping sessions, and practical guidance for other teams.
• Share what you learn, internally through Slack, brown bags, and DEPT U, and externally through articles or talks as project work allows.

Qualifications

• Proven experience building and maintaining production-level backend systems used by real people.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Experience designing and integrating APIs and third-party systems.
• Solid working knowledge of database platforms, both SQL and NoSQL.
• Enough familiarity with modern frontend development (preferably Angular and Typescript) to read the code, review a PR, and debug across the stack.
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider. Google Cloud preferred, AWS or Azure also welcome.
• Daily, real-world use of GenAI productivity tools (Gemini CLI, Claude Code, Codex) in your development workflow.
• A working understanding of core LLM concepts and where they're a good fit for a problem.
• Fluency with version control (git), Agile processes, and CI/CD tooling.
• The ability to research independently and know when to ask for help, without spinning wheels on already-solved problems.
• A track record of "getting sh*t done" in a fast-paced environment.

Bonus points

• Experience mentoring engineers earlier in their careers.
• Exposure to agent development frameworks.
• Contributions to open source, technical writing, or conference speaking.

Benefits

• Healthcare, Dental, and Vision coverage
• 401k plan, plus matching
• PTO
• Paid Company Holidays
• Parental Leave