Senior Backend Lead - Inventory Systems & Real-Time APIs

URBN; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Employee discounts

Job summary

URBN is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead development, optimization, and production support of the inventory management platform. You will own outcomes, architect solutions, and rally a team to reliable, measurable results that meet delivery timelines.

The role emphasizes hands-on leadership, complex system design, and collaboration with product, ops, and other engineering teams to align technical work with business priorities.

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering; 3+ years in a delivery-focused leadership/ownership role.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, and debugging.
• Proven track record taking a system from design through production with cross-team coordination.
• Expert-level backend engineering in a modern, high-performance language with async patterns.
• Deep experience with production-grade data stores, modeling, indexing, and optimization.
• Experience with distributed messaging/event streams: consumer groups, batching, error handling, scaling.
• Experience operating containerized workloads in orchestrated environments (deployments, config, autoscaling).
• Comprehensive testing discipline across unit, integration, behavior-driven, and performance/load testing.
• Experience with supply chain / inventory / order management systems is a plus.
• Preferred experience with Python programming language.

Responsibilities

• Design and own RESTful web services and APIs for real-time inventory operations at scale.
• Architect asynchronous event-driven systems and stream processing pipelines.
• Implement complex domain logic with emphasis on correctness and data integrity.
• Design data storage schemas, indexing, and query optimization for high-throughput workloads.
• Design and tune caching layers and invalidation strategies for low-latency reads.
• Own comprehensive test strategy across unit, integration, behavior-driven, and performance testing.
• Define latency, throughput, and query performance targets; ensure redundancy and graceful degradation.
• Lead SRE-like practices: observability, alerting, capacity planning, and deployment/release engineering.
• Establish engineering standards: static analysis, type checking, automated gates, code reviews.
• Own the technical roadmap end-to-end and deliver major platform initiatives.
• Collaborate with product/ops/other teams to align work with business priorities.
• Mentor engineers and manage technical debt vs feature velocity.
• Lead on-call and incident response and drive post-incident follow-through.

Skills

Backend engineering

Asynchronous programming

Distributed messaging

API design

Performance tuning

Observability

Container orchestration

Testing discipline

Python

Data modeling

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

SQL/NoSQL databases

Job description

URBN is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead development, optimization, and production support of the inventory management platform. You will own outcomes, architect solutions, and rally a team to reliable, measurable results that meet delivery timelines.

The role emphasizes hands-on leadership, complex system design, and collaboration with product, ops, and other engineering teams to align technical work with business priorities.