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Swap is building the infrastructure behind modern agentic commerce—an AI-native platform connecting backend operations with storefront experience. The company centralizes global operations for brands, powers intelligent workflows, and provides real-time data for margin-protecting decisions. Products span cross-border, tax, returns, demand planning, and a next-generation agentic storefront.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll be a technical leader on the team building Swap's agentic storefront—an AI shopping experience that helps shoppers discover, decide, and buy through natural conversation. You'll set direction for several engineering teams, tackle the hardest cross-cutting problems, and remain hands-on in critical code. You'll partner closely with Product, Design, Data, and engineering leadership to translate ambitious goals into practical execution plans, and mentor engineers around you.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading large multi-quarter initiatives involving multiple teams, from scoping through production.
- Writing exemplar code in critical paths and setting the implementation bar for the wider group.
- Reviewing important designs from other teams, balancing quality, speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Defining and upholding operational standards: monitoring, availability, scalability, security, release safety, and cost awareness. Leading serious incidents and driving appropriate fixes.
- Leading tool evaluations and architecture migrations, making build-vs-buy trade-offs explicit.
- Using AI effectively and pushing back on AI-generated complexity to maintain code health.
- Owning business results: defining success metrics, monitoring post-launch, and challenging constructively when work won't move the needle for merchants.
- Mentoring Senior Engineers and below; leading or joining senior-level interviews.
- Writing and improving critical documentation: architecture direction, decision records, runbooks.
Requirements:
- Significant experience (typically 8+ years) building and shipping production software, with a track record of leading complex cross-team initiatives.
- Deep expertise in TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js, including architecting REST and/or GraphQL APIs and distributed systems.
- Comfort working outside your primary language and stack; Staff engineers are expected to be T-shaped.
- Strong relational database, data modeling, and SQL skills; familiarity with NoSQL.
- Experience designing for reliability and scale in the cloud, with solid CI/CD, observability, and incident-response practices.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs or agentic systems, or a proven track record of picking up new technology quickly and applying it sensibly.
- Daily use of AI coding tools, with judgment about when to trust them and when not to.
- Preferred: experience in eCommerce systems and platforms.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to explain trade-offs in business terms to any audience.
- Team player with a bias for ownership: you bring solutions along with problems, and work isn't done until it's live and stable.
