Senior, Software Engineer

dept; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

DEPT is a Growth Invention company pushing the boundaries of technology and marketing. As a Senior Engineer, you will own sizeable backend components, drive them to completion, and align with product and design teams to deliver high-impact software.

You will mainly work on backend systems in Python, design and integrate APIs, and apply AI-assisted techniques to real client work while keeping a strong focus on reliability, performance, and scalable infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Production-grade backend experience required.
• Strong Python proficiency and API integration experience.
• Cloud and CI/CD experience with modern stacks.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain production backend services and APIs used by real clients.
• Design and implement scalable backend architectures and data schemas.
• Collaborate with product, design, and frontend teams to ship features on time.
• Apply AI-assisted capabilities to real client work and contribute reusable templates.

Skills

Backend development

Python

API design

SQL/NoSQL databases

Angular/TypeScript basics

Cloud providers

GenAI tools

LLM concepts

Git

Agile & CI/CD

Independent research

Fast-paced environment

Tools

Gemini CLI

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

WHY DEPT®?

We are a Growth Invention company built to help the world's most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, we create what is next by pioneering ideas, acting fast, and moving further because standing still just is not in our DNA.

We are drawn to people who stay curious, move with intent, and never stop inventing. Our culture runs on three values: better together, relentlessly curious, and get sh*t done. It is how we work, how we grow, and how we make things that matter.

At DEPT®, you will find the freedom to explore, the space to collaborate, and the trust to make a real impact for our clients, for each other, and for the world we are helping to build.

What we believe in

We build software for the world's most ambitious brands, and we're opinionated about how it gets built:

Code quality is a top priority. Style guides, code reviews, and best practices are how we move fast without breaking things. You'll also get your hands on a wide range of cutting-edge technology.

Great UI/UX is critical. Aesthetics, usability, and speed are all part of the product. A technically correct experience that feels bad isn't finished.

Collaboration wins projects. Great communication is the single strongest predictor of whether a project goes well.

We're pragmatic. We know what to build and what to leave alone, and we make real-world tradeoffs between cost, speed, and craft. Shipping something useful beats architecting something perfect.

We're intellectually curious. We're constantly learning through craft show & tells, lunch & learns, workshares, and active Slack channels full of talented engineers across the globe.

The role

As a Senior Engineer, you own significant portions of a project and drive them to completion. You take a semi-defined problem, ask the questions that sharpen it, turn it into a plan, and ship it. You're past the stage of needing fully specified tasks handed to you, and you're building the judgment to know which task matters most.

You're comfortable working alongside product managers, engineers, marketing, sales, and finance, and you can explain your work to any of them without retreating into jargon. Most of what we build depends on getting those people to a shared understanding of what's being made and why.

This role is primarily backend focused, occasionally diving into cloud infrastructure. However, you should also be comfortable enough in a modern frontend codebase to apply best practices and create something visually appealing and smooth to use.

What you'll do

• Build and deploy scalable backend services and APIs for global brands, taking high ownership of your workstreams and their dependencies.
• Take specs that are incomplete or ambiguous, resolve the open questions, and turn them into clear requirements, tasks, and stories with time-to-complete estimates people can plan around.
• Participate in technical design of systems, schemas, and pipelines, and offer sound guidance on architecture and infrastructure decisions.
• Integrate third-party APIs and systems, and design the contracts that frontend teams and other services build against.
• Perform code reviews that raise the bar, both submitting your own work and giving constructive feedback that makes your teammates better.
• Surface technical blockers, risks, and client-facing issues early enough for the team to course-correct.
• Advocate for best practices in testing, security, performance, and CI/CD, and encourage others to do the same.
• Work directly with working-level client stakeholders over email, on calls, and in person, and start building demo and presentation content of your own.
• Apply AI and agentic capabilities to real client work, and contribute back to how the craft adopts them through reusable templates, prototyping sessions, and practical guidance for other teams.
• Share what you learn, internally through Slack, brown bags, and DEPT U, and externally through articles or talks as project work allows.

What you bring

• Proven experience building and maintaining production-level backend systems used by real people.
• Strong proficiency in Python .
• Experience designing and integrating APIs and third-party systems.
• Solid working knowledge of database platforms , both SQL and NoSQL.
• Enough familiarity with modern frontend development (preferably Angular and Typescript) to read the code, review a PR, and debug across the stack.
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider . Google Cloud preferred, AWS or Azure also welcome.
• Daily, real-world use of GenAI productivity tools (Gemini CLI, Claude Code, Codex) in your development workflow.
• A working understanding of core LLM concepts and where’re a good fit for a problem.
• Fluency with version control (git), Agile processes, and CI/CD tooling.
• The ability to research independently and know when to ask for help, without spinning wheels on already-solved problems.
• A track record of "getting sh*t done" in a fast-paced e