Senior Commerce Backend Engineer

Summary

Join DEPT®'s Commerce team as a Backend Senior Software Engineer and contribute to the development and maintenance of our critical financial infrastructure. You will design, develop, and maintain Rails backend payment solutions, debug and refactor legacy code, improve data interactions using SQL, and streamline manual investigation tasks. You will also build an observability foundation, elevate our Ruby on Rails codebase, champion test-driven development, and collaborate with product managers and engineers. This role requires deep expertise in Ruby on Rails, SQL, and root cause analysis, as well as experience with observability and monitoring solutions. You will be a key advocate for engineering rigor and operational excellence, leaving a lasting impact on our codebase and processes.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on professional experience developing with Ruby on Rails, demonstrating deep expertise in the framework and the broader Ruby ecosystem
• Deep SQL proficiency, with experience in writing complex queries for data analysis, discrepancy resolution, and performance improvement in production environments
• Demonstrable expertise in root cause analysis of complex system failures
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining robust observability and monitoring solutions for critical systems (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic)
• Proven experience navigating and improving legacy codebase reliability and performance
• Expertise across the entire software development lifecycle, with a focus on delivering high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested solutions
• Mastery in writing comprehensive and effective tests, particularly RSpec unit and integration tests, in complex Rails applications
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts
• A relentless commitment to quality and a desire to continuously improve engineering standards

Responsibilities

• Work independently or with other engineers to design, develop, and maintain Rails backend payment solutions that integrate with 3rd party providers like Stripe and Sovos, debugging and refactoring legacy code as needed
• Perform manual testing of your work to validate usability and design accuracy
• Help debug and root cause: Diagnose and resolve system errors, leveraging tools like Datadog to pinpoint issues and prevent recurrence
• Improve our data interactions: Utilize your deep SQL expertise to write queries that uncover payment system discrepancies in Snowflake and improve the performance of slow or legacy queries
• Streamline manual investigation tasks: Proactively identify and champion opportunities to automate or streamline common manual investigation tasks, increasing speed to issue resolution and freeing up engineering time for more impactful work
• Assist in building an observability foundation: Design, implement, and maintain monitoring and alerting systems, ensuring visibility into system health and enabling proactive issue identification
• Elevate our Ruby on Rails codebase: Serve as a subject matter expert in Ruby and Rails, guiding best practices for development and optimizing application performance through discussion and code reviews
• Champion test-driven development: Lead by example in writing comprehensive and effective RSpec unit and integration tests, ensuring code quality and long-term maintainability
• Collaborate closely with product managers and other engineers to translate complex requirements into easily maintainable technical solutions
• Contribute to code reviews, providing insightful feedback that raises the technical proficiency of the entire team
• Document your discoveries, designs, and operational insights, ensuring knowledge transfer and fostering a culture of clarity

Preferred Qualifications

• E-commerce/invoicing/billing/fintech experience where you have worked on ensuring correct data for financial transactions
• The ability to design data models that are easy for downstream teams, like data engineering or accounting, to get the data they need