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Do you want to build products that connect thousands of restaurant customers every day? Do you love writing PEP-8'ed, unit-tested, and documented Python? Does the thought of continuous integration and agile workflow encourage you to craft high-quality, well-tested, and resilient methods? Do you feel security, availability, and maintainability are inextricably linked to your application architecture?
Are all() of your answers to the above == True and did you envision that as a list comprehension? If so, keep reading; this might be the product building environment you have been searching for.
Our Product and Technology
Our backend applications are written in Python 3. The RESTful APIs we develop enable multiple client-facing platforms, ranging from our website products built with React & Redux to our native mobile applications. We write code to integrate with partners in the restaurant technology space. Depending on our use case, we store data in MySQL RDS, Elasticsearch or Redis.
Our infrastructure-as-code platform is hosted by Amazon Web Services, developed and orchestrated using Ansible and Terraform. We automate as much as we can, utilizing Jenkins for deployments.
About the Position:
ChowNow’s Engineering Team has built a reliable, stable, and modern platform enabling restaurant owners to accept pickup and delivery orders online. Our “quality product first” approach to engineering drives the team to succeed and has contributed to the success and growth of the company. We are looking for similarly minded engineers who care deeply about the product, the customers, the team members, and the codebase itself. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will have a deep impact on our platform and the team. You will influence technology choices, support leadership in decision making, solve hard problems, and enable the growth of and contribute to the future architecture of the platform.
About Us:
ChowNow is unique among tech startups in the restaurant space. We power branded online ordering systems for independent restaurants across North America – via websites, Google, Instagram, and through branded iOS and Android apps – and we do it all for a reasonable monthly fee regardless of order volume. We operate this way because of our belief in being fair, sustainable, and equitable with our restaurant partners. And the same goes for our workplace.
Diversity, teamwork, and mutual respect are among our core company values. And we pride ourselves on giving our teams plenty of opportunities to make their mark. To date we’ve created over 20,000 apps for our restaurant partners – something that’s never been done before in our category. And as we expand to new markets, further spreading the word about the ChowNow difference, those opportunities to create, build, and grow will only increase. If this sounds like the kind of workplace, and the kind of mission, that appeals to you, we’d love to talk.
Together we can preserve neighborhood flavor, one restaurant at a time.
Within 1 month, you'll...
- Learn our business model and how it translates to platform architecture and features. We work closely with the product and it influences how we think about the code.
- Master development patterns and collaborative processes. We work together to make work efficient.
- Write internal documentation and test your features and systems. We take responsibility for communication and quality.
- Grasp the basics of the platform architecture. Developers share responsibility for our always available APIs.
- Identify business concerns that exist within our monolith that are prime candidates for extraction into a purpose-built service and evaluate options with stakeholders.
- Embed yourself within one of our agile squads and ship a feature or two.
Within 3 months, you'll...
- Have made a valued impact on multiple products across our platform. We celebrate our success by measuring our impact, internally and externally.
- Build, launch, and support your first big feature in one of our many products. We ship with iterative agility.
- Understand major feature areas of our applications and be comfortable navigating the stack and infrastructure. We are all generalists, but we specialize in feature areas too.
- Have participated in the architecture and implementation of new developer and user-facing features. We communicate and collaborate on our architecture to achieve security, scalability, and maximum learning.
- Start to understand where our backend team can get better; what “big challenges” need solving and how to improve developer productivity
- Assess our CI/CD landscape and look for opportunities to reduce cycle time and ship faster.
Within 6 months, you'll...
- Build within reliable estimates. We know this takes time, and we strive to be accurate with each other.
- Feel comfortable as a knowledge leader, teaching others and continuing to learn. We want to learn as much as we teach.
- Be an essential part of growing our team by fully participating in the hiring interview process. We share responsibility to grow our team.
- Define and help execute a major technology initiative within a squad.
- Become a “force multiplier” with respect to colleagues, seeking ways of making all of us better engineers.
- Have made at least one major cultural or process shift that improves the productivity of those around you.
- Drive patterns, set best practices, and own systems; both applications and critical infrastructure.
You should apply if:
- You have experience building SaaS products, e-commerce or similar online platforms
- You are excited about new technologies, are able to judge the maturity of the latest innovations, and find practical use for them
- You constantly work to get better at your craft
- You find excitement in learning new business models and transferring such knowledge into beautiful software design
- You like collaborating with multiple stakeholders within and outside the Engineering Team towards a common goal
- You make decisions based on data and evidence
- You enjoy iterative, agile development process with frequent releases
- You take great pleasure in writing quality, highly maintainable code
- You thrive in environments supporting your growth, and where you can support others
- You have strong opinions about software development lifecycles and CI/CD and a proven ability to drive consensus among engineers.
- You like to influence a team’s operational- and engineering- excellence programs.
- You’ve helped an organization move from a monolithic to a service-oriented architecture and want to do it again.
About Our Benefits:
- Competitive Salary
- Ongoing training and growth opportunities.
- A "Best Place to Work" winner multiple times where we focus on creating a great employee experience
- Rock solid medical, dental, and vision plans.
- Remote Work stipend
- Mental Health Coverage - we offer several programs to support your mental health and wellness goals.
- 3 weeks paid vacation; paid holidays; we expect you to work hard, but still enjoy your personal life
- 7 weeks of baby bonding time for all new parents (within the first year of birth or adoption), 8 Weeks of Paid Pregnancy Leave.
- 401(k) Matching
- Employer-contributing student loan assistance program.
- Employee Stock Incentive Plan.
- Pet insurance for your fur babies
- Quarterly Industry Speakers Series.
- Quarterly Tech Events (Women, LGBTQ, Diversity, Inclusion).
- Consistent & fair leadership: we’ll share info, set clear goals, show you respect, and treat everyone fairly.
- Enough freedom to spread your wings while still holding you accountable.
ChowNow takes the health and safety of our team seriously and requires all employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 prior to starting work. We strongly believe that this is the best way to protect our employees, families, clients, and communities. All requests for accommodations will be considered.
As one of ChowNow’s core values, “Celebrates Diversity”, we are committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment. ChowNow is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.
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