Senior Software Engineer

URBN (Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie Group, Free People & Nuuly); Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

URBN is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the inventory management platform. You will own the design and delivery of real-time inventory operations at scale, architect asynchronous pipelines, and drive performance optimizations.

You will mentor teammates, define coding standards, and collaborate with product, ops, and other engineering teams to align technical work with business priorities. Strong Python and backend expertise are a plus.

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering with ownership of delivery
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools and practices
• Demonstrated track record taking a system from design to production launch
• Expert-level backend engineering with asynchronous patterns
• Deep experience with production-grade data stores and transactions
• Experience with distributed messaging/event streams
• Experience operating containerized workloads in orchestration environments
• Comprehensive testing across unit/integration/behavior-driven/performance
• Experience with supply chain/inventory/order management systems a plus
• Preferred Python experience

Responsibilities

• Design and own RESTful web services and APIs for real-time inventory operations
• Architect asynchronous event-driven systems and streaming pipelines
• Implement complex domain logic with emphasis on correctness and data integrity
• Design data storage schemas, indexing, and query optimization for high throughput
• Design and tune caching layers for low-latency reads
• Own test strategy across unit/integration/BDT/performance testing
• Own performance and resiliency targets including latency and throughput
• Lead on-call, incident response, and post-incident review
• Establish engineering standards and code quality gates
• Own end-to-end technical roadmap and cross-team planning
• Mentor engineers and manage technical debt vs feature velocity

Skills

Technical leadership

AI-assisted development

System design

Backend engineering

Asynchronous programming

Observability

Testing discipline

Supply chain knowledge

Python

Tools

Python

Job description

Senior Engineer — Inventory Management System

URBN is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to Lead development, performance optimization, and production support of URBN's inventory management platform. We're looking for a hands‑on technical leader who has taken complex systems from concept through production, architect the solution, rally a team around it, and see it through to a reliable, measurable outcome. You will own outcomes and be accountable for delivery timelines as much as the technology.

Role Responsibilities

• Design and own RESTful web services and APIs supporting real‑time inventory operations at scale
• Architect asynchronous event‑driven systems and stream processing pipelines, including consumer/producer patterns, batching strategies, error handling, and dead‑letter/failure recovery flows
• Implement complex, business‑critical domain logic with an emphasis on correctness, auditability, and data integrity
• Design data storage schemas, indexing strategies, and query optimization for high‑throughput transactional and audit workloads
• Design and tune caching layers and invalidation strategies to support low‑latency reads at scale
• Own comprehensive test strategy across unit, integration, behavior‑driven, and performance/load testing; maintain high coverage standards
• Own performance and resiliency: define and meet targets for latency, throughput, and query performance; build in redundancy and graceful degradation
• Lead SRE‑like practices: observability (structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, health checks), alerting, capacity planning, and deployment/release engineering
• Establish engineering standards: static analysis, type checking, automated quality gates, and code review practices
• Own the technical roadmap end‑to‑end: scope, sequence, and deliver major platform initiatives from design through production rollout
• Participate in cross‑functional planning with product, ops, and other engineering teams to align technical work with business priorities and deadlines
• Mentor engineering team members; define technical roadmap and manage technical debt vs. feature velocity
• Lead on‑call support and incident response; diagnose issues across API, database, and cache layers, and drive post‑incident follow‑through

Role Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering; 3+ years in a role with direct ownership of project delivery (technical lead, engineering manager, or senior IC accountable for outcomes, not just code)
• Experience with AI‑assisted development tools and practices to accelerate coding, testing, and debugging
• Demonstrated track record of taking at least one significant system or platform from design through production launch, including the tradeoffs, setbacks, and cross‑team coordination involved
• Expert‑level backend engineering in a modern, high‑performance language/framework ecosystem, with strong command of asynchronous programming patterns
• Deep experience with production‑grade data stores: schema/data modeling, indexing, transactions, replication, and query optimization at scale
• Experience with distributed messaging/event‑streaming systems: consumer group management, batch processing, error handling, and partition/scaling management
• Experience operating containerized workloads in an orchestrated environment (deployments, configuration/secrets management, autoscaling, resource tuning)
• Comprehensive testing discipline across unit, integration, behavior‑driven, and performance/load testing
• Experience with supply chain / inventory / order management systems a plus
• Preferred experience with programming language - Python