Senior Backend Engineer

Bookshop.org is looking for a senior backend engineer to help build out the Go APIs and ETL systems that will power our ebooks platform. We’re a small team serving millions of customers across multiple countries and we’ve been adopting Go into our services for the last few years. We still have a lot Ruby, too, so it’s a big plus if you’ve got Ruby/Rails experience.

You’ll be helping us with big picture projects:

• Building a robust API that can be used internally and by third parties for finding books, authors, placing orders, and more
• Publishing pipelines that can accept a wide variety of digital content from publishers, and streaming DRM-protected epub3 ebook content to end users
• Consuming large amounts of publisher data across many providers and normalizing book metadata into compact, easily searchable formats that used globally

What You’ll Need To Succeed

• Kindness - we do our best to set egos aside, treat each other with empathy, and always assume the best intentions
• Being comfortable with uncertainty - Some of the problems we’re solving in the book industry have no obvious best practices and we won’t always get a solution right the first time.
• Able to work with lots of data - We’ve got tens of millions of books available globally and some very large datasets and workloads. Knowing how to optimize database queries and design services that can handle that volume is crucial for our daily work
• Skilled at synthesizing disparate formats - We have different formatting requirements for each wholesaler, different categorization schema for books in each country, unique shipping validations in many regions, and the list go on and on. You’ll be regularly defining elegant, compact data structures to express the same idea in many contexts.
• Thoughtful design - We’re a small team supporting many systems, so solutions have to be democratized so that anyone on the team can understand and work on everything. This sometimes means giving up some performance for a more easily understood mechanism, as well as writing really great docs about how new features work.

Measures of Success

• You've helped successfully launch and maintain Bookshop's ebook platform
• Bookshop’s system stability, response times, and efficiency are regularly trending in the right directions because of your work.
• You’re making sure that bottlenecks in our Ruby applications are being regularly replaced with improved applications in Go
• The rest of the team is able to contribute to our Go services and APIs more quickly and more often because of the work you’re doing to document and refine the developer experience.
• You’re improving observability of key metrics for the entire team, and empowering others to preempt issues with quality alerting and reports.
• New features, services, and apps, both internal and third-party, can be developed quickly because of the flexibility of the APIs you’re designing and maintaining.

Salary and Benefits

The yearly salary range for our Senior Engineers based in the US is $120,000 - $180,000 USD depending on experience and the position is fully remote. Paid time off is 4 weeks (20 business days) plus all US bank holidays, as well as paid sick leave. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance and a 401K with company contribution.

To Apply

Please send a resume and cover letter to [email protected].

About Bookshop.org

Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores.

We believe that bookstores are essential to a healthy culture. They’re where authors can connect with readers, where we discover new writers, where children get hooked on the thrill of reading that can last a lifetime. They’re also anchors for our downtowns and communities.

As more and more people buy their books online, we wanted to create an easy, convenient way for you to get your books and support bookstores at the same time.

By design, we give away over 75% of our profit margin to stores, publications, authors and others who make up the thriving, inspirational culture around books!

Equal Employment Opportunity

Bookshop.org is committed to fostering, cultivating, and preserving a culture of diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity. We are engaged in the ongoing development of a work environment built on these principles—one that enforces respectful communication, encourages teamwork and participation, and supports employee’s varying needs through policies supporting work/life balance, accomodation, and flexibility. We know that our business benefits immensely from its diverse team, and that our individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, and talents make our company stronger and better. In recruiting, we prioritize and welcome the contributions of a diverse staff.

Being an equal opportunity employer means that Bookshop.org provides the same opportunities for hire, advancement, training, and benefits to everyone, without discrimination due to protected characteristics such as age, race, color, sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nation of origin, religion, disability, genetic information including medical history, or other protected status.

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