Remote Senior Principal Backend Engineer - GraphQL & Shopify

Shutterfly, Inc.; Plano (TX); Remote; USD 150,000 - 226,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus program

Health benefits

401(k)

Job summary

Spoonflower, part of the Shutterfly family, seeks a Senior Principal Software Engineer to drive backend systems powering our commerce experience. You will own core services and API design, lead GraphQL federation, and build Shopify integrations at scale.

You will partner with frontend, product, and platform teams to improve data models, service boundaries, and system reliability, while mentoring engineers and shaping technical standards across the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend or platform engineering experience.
• Proven track record building distributed systems at scale.
• Deep GraphQL expertise, including federation architectures.
• Experience with Shopify or similar ecommerce platforms.
• Strong Node.js and TypeScript proficiency.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and evolution of core backend services and APIs supporting commerce workflows.
• Lead architecture and implementation of GraphQL services on our Apollo Federation supergraph.
• Build and improve Shopify integrations as part of a cross-team effort.
• Reconcile Shopify's inventory-and-SKU commerce model with our made-to-order fulfillment flow.
• Define and improve service boundaries, data models, and integration points across systems.
• Partner with frontend, product, and platform teams to simplify how teams build and integrate.
• Diagnose and resolve deep distributed-systems and runtime-level failures, including federation transport behavior, connection-pool issues, and event-loop performance under load.
• Own production systems, including operability, observability, and incident response.
• Act as a technical reference point through design reviews, mentoring, and setting engineering standards.
• Influence roadmap decisions by providing clear tradeoffs grounded in business and system impact.

Skills

Backend engineering

GraphQL

Node.js/TypeScript

Distributed systems

Shopify integration

Kubernetes

Terraform

OpenSearch

AWS

Observability

Tools

Shopify APIs

Apollo Federation

Terraform

Kubernetes

OpenSearch

AWS

Job description

Spoonflower, part of the Shutterfly family, seeks a Senior Principal Software Engineer to drive backend systems powering our commerce experience. You will own core services and API design, lead GraphQL federation, and build Shopify integrations at scale.

You will partner with frontend, product, and platform teams to improve data models, service boundaries, and system reliability, while mentoring engineers and shaping technical standards across the organization.