Staff Software Engineer (Marketplace)

Zipline; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is hiring for a Staff Software Engineer on the Marketplace team to own critical commerce services across merchant portals, partner integrations, billing, and fulfillment tooling. You will drive reliability, architecture, and measurable improvements in multi-region operations.

You will lead cross-functional launches, define success criteria, and own post-launch remediation while delivering high-velocity updates to production systems that scale with the network.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping production distributed systems.
• Experience with transactional commerce, payments, or marketplace systems at scale.
• Ownership across frontend, backend, and data/streaming pipelines.
• On-call leadership and post-incident analysis to drive remediation.
• Ability to define metrics and trade-offs with data.

Responsibilities

• Own one or more production services end-to-end in the commerce stack, including design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations.
• Lead cross-functional launches with clear success criteria and post-launch remediation.
• Build and enforce marketplace controls and policy tooling, including gates and pre-production simulation.
• Ship partner integrations with SLAs and robust data feeds, handling migrations and versioning.
• Maintain observability and reliability with defined SLOs, dashboards, and runbooks.
• Mentor engineers and drive durability through architecture reviews and abstractions.

Skills

Go

Python

React

Kafka

PostgreSQL

AWS

Grafana

Honeycomb

Bazel

Distributed systems

Tools

Kafka

PostgreSQL

AWS

Grafana

Honeycomb

Bazel

gRPC

Job description

• You are hiring into the Staff Software Engineer role on Zipline’s Marketplace team
• This team builds the commercial engine that turns Zipline’s delivery network into a scalable business: merchant-facing portals and integrations, marketplace policy and dispatch logic, fulfillment tooling at partner locations, and the billing/settlements backbone that must be financially correct across promotions, refunds, revenue shares, and taxes
• These systems run live against real missions—affecting partner operations, customer experience, and cashflow—and must operate across metros and countries with strict safety, reliability, and financial correctness constraints
• This hire will be an owner/operator: shipping core services, owning production reliability and incident response, and moving product and architecture forward in a regulated, hardware-integrated logistics environment. Role may require multi-day travel to partner sites and occasional weekend or evening production support during launches
• Own one or more production services end-to-end in the commerce stack (merchant portal, partner integrations, marketplace platform, billing engine, fulfillment apps, or support tooling), including design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations
• Deliver measurable improvements, such as reducing merchant onboarding time by 50% within 6 months for assigned flows, bringing reconciliation variance below 0.1% month-over-month for owned payment paths, and reducing incident-driven customer-impacting downtime to under 30 minutes MTTR for priority services
• Lead cross-functional launches by defining success criteria, authoring rollout and rollback plans, coordinating with Field Operations, Safety/Compliance, Product, and Finance, and owning post-launch remediation and success metrics
• Build and enforce marketplace controls and policy tooling that enable operators to safely manage pricing, capacity allocation, and prioritization, including feature gates, experiment scaffolding, and pre-production simulation using historical mission data
• Ship partner integrations (POS connectors, APIs, and data feeds) with clear SLAs, backpressure handling, and schema/version migration strategies, while serving as the technical lead for critical partner onboarding and incident response
• Maintain observability and service reliability by defining SLOs, building monitoring and dashboards (Grafana/Honeycomb), and owning alerting thresholds, runbooks, and on-call rotations for assigned services
• Mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and make durable abstraction decisions that reduce cross-product fragmentation

Operating intensity and logistics:

able to support occasional off-hours launches and urgent production incidents; available for regular multi-day travel to partner sites (up to ~20% travel typical); preferred to be based near the primary office for hybrid work and rapid cross-functional coordination

Strong systems skills:

production-grade API design, data modelling for ledgers, eventual consistency tradeoffs, schema migrations, and designing for idempotency and retry semantics

Tech stack experience:

deep proficiency in one or more of Go, Python, or scalable backend languages; experience with React or similar for merchant-facing apps; familiarity with Kafka, gRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, observability tools (Grafana, Honeycomb), and build tooling (Bazel) is required for day-one productivity

Measured outcomes orientation:

able to define and hit specific metrics (reconciliation accuracy, onboarding time, MTTR, throughput/latency targets) and to present trade-offs with data

Must-have traits:

rigorous attention to correctness and edge-cases in financial flows, clear bias for measurable ownership and accountability, ability to simplify complex cross-boundary systems into durable abstractions

Must have shipped transactional commerce, payments, billing, or marketplace systems in production at scale (millions of orders/day or multi-region transactional volume), or equivalent experience operating financial reconciliation and settlements pipelines

Minimum 5+ years building and shipping production distributed systems and web applications; evidence of ownership across frontend, backend, and data/streaming pipelines

Demonstrated incident leadership:

on-call experience, runbook authorship, performing post-incident root-cause analysis, and driving remediation to prevent recurrence