Backend Engineer (Scala)

About Zowie:

At Zowie, we believe that buying online should feel like walking into your favorite local shop: personal, friendly, and easy. Our mission is to recreate offline shopping experiences online - but better. Zowie brings speed and empathy to customer interactions. Our platform automates responses to repetitive questions around return policy, order status, etc., and saves time for customer service agents, who can then proactively turn website visitors into paying customers. It can work as an add-on with existing tools (Zendesk, Shopify, Gorgias, etc.) or become a standalone customer service platform.

We are:

🚀 Growing fast. We plan on keeping the Team growing! You’ll have a lot of autonomy and impact as we grow.

🏈 Like a sports team. We take ownership of our work and believe in personal accountability. At the same time, we work together, support each other, and focus on winning as a team.

🧑‍💻 Remote-first and hours are flexible. We allow everyone to figure out the best ways to collaborate with their team. At the end of the day, it's about delivering! Those in Poland can work from our offices in Cracow and Warsaw.

We strive to be:

💪 Ambitious and innovative. We don’t settle on existing solutions and keep looking for better ways to tackle challenges.

👻 Bold and free-thinking. We trust our employees to find the best solutions.

🤸‍♀️ Agile and high-performing. We work smarter, not harder. We use our OKRs to keep ourselves focused.

🤠 Unafraid of change. Zowie is growing, and the market is changing. We thrive in an ever-evolving environment.

What you'll do:

You'll play a crucial role as the 7th-10th backend engineer, joining one of the quickly expanding Product Engineering teams. Don't be misled by our size! Despite being compact, we efficiently manage and enhance a sophisticated system comprising over 100 microservices, predominantly coded in Scala. These microservices communicate synchronously through gRPC, handle asynchronous calls via Kafka, expose GraphQL to the frontend, and leverage databases like PostgreSQL, Mongo, ElasticSearch, or Redis.

At Zowie, our engineering ethos is centered around the tangible impact our work has on our users. It's not just about meeting predefined requirements. It's about having a substantial influence on the overall solution. We believe in the empowerment of our engineers to contribute not only to code but also to the strategic decisions that shape our product. This requires a holistic understanding of the business, the product, and the technology at play. Your expertise will enable you to connect the dots and provide valuable insights to guide the best course of action.

Autonomy and meritocracy are at the core of our values. We champion the idea that sound arguments should prevail. As part of the team, you'll be instrumental in shaping end-to-end solutions, influencing architecture decisions, and proposing crucial enhancements to our engineering practices.

Our daily routine aligns with industry standards, including regular planning sessions, standups, timely code reviews, and close collaboration with fellow engineers.

Think of our teams as startups in a startup. We value efficiency and therefore the only constant you should expect is Retrospective. Everything else is being constantly adjusted to fit the changing needs.

We will be happy to be fully transparent with you; tell us what you want to know!

Ideally, you'll bring with you:

• Excellent coding skills and passion for growing expertise
• 2+ years of experience with Scala or other JVM languages
• Excellent knowledge of SQL and relational databases
• Strong communication, so you can actively listen and easily explain complex technical issues with simple business and product words
• Intermediate system design skills that allow you to choose technologies and architectures wisely
• Product acumen, ownership, and focus on value delivered for the customers
• Working proficiency in English and Polish (both spoken and written)

It will be awesome if you have:

• Experience with NoSQL databases
• Experience with Kafka or other message brokers
• Experience with Akka framework
• Experience with functional programming libraries like Cats, Fs2, ZIO, Http4s, etc.
• Experience with GraphQL
• Experience with Docker Swarm / Kubernetes

We will offer you:

👉 Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP). You’re a part of our company’s future success.

👉 Unlimited paid time off. We trust each other and don’t count days.

👉 Great company offsites and individual integration budgets. We spend time together in person to strengthen our team.

👉 Health benefits. We offer an additional health insurance package.

👉 Development budget. We want to grow personally and professionally together.

👉 Home-office funds. Make yourself a comfy space for work on a daily basis.