Staff Backend Architect: GraphQL & Shopify Scale

Shutterfly; United States; On-site; USD 159,750 - 225,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus potential

Health benefits

401K program

Job summary

Spoonflower, part of the Shutterfly family, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to design and evolve core backend systems powering our commerce experience. You will own distributed services, drive GraphQL federation, and strengthen Shopify integrations across teams.

This role emphasizes hands-on ownership, architectural leadership, and mentoring within a collaborative engineering culture focused on scale, reliability, and performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend or platform engineering experience.
• Proficient in building and operating distributed systems and APIs at scale.
• Deep expertise in GraphQL design, including federated/supergraph architectures.
• Experience with Shopify or similar ecommerce platforms.
• Strong Node.js and TypeScript skills.
• Proven ability to diagnose production failures down to runtime or transport level.
• Ownership of production systems with focus on performance and uptime.
• Able to work independently and drive high-impact work to completion.
• Strong communication on tradeoffs and system design decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own design and evolution of core backend services and APIs supporting commerce workflows.
• Lead architecture and implementation of GraphQL services on Apollo Federation supergraph.
• Build and improve Shopify integrations as part of cross-team effort.
• Reconcile Shopify model with made-to-order fulfillment and lifecycle challenges.
• Define data models and integration points across systems.
• Partner with frontend, product, and platform teams to simplify development.
• Diagnose and resolve distributed-system and runtime failures, including federation transport.
• Own production operability, observability, and incident response.
• Serve as a technical reference in design reviews and engineering standards.
• Influence roadmap decisions with clear tradeoffs and business impact.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

GraphQL design

Shopify experience

Node.js

TypeScript

Production ownership

Independent work

Systems reliability

Effective communication

Tools

Apollo Federation

Kubernetes

Terraform

OpenSearch

AWS (SNS/SQS)

Job description

Spoonflower, part of the Shutterfly family, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to design and evolve core backend systems powering our commerce experience. You will own distributed services, drive GraphQL federation, and strengthen Shopify integrations across teams.

This role emphasizes hands-on ownership, architectural leadership, and mentoring within a collaborative engineering culture focused on scale, reliability, and performance.