URBN Senior Software Engineer

URBN (Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie Group, Free People & Nuuly); Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

PTO

Employee discounts

Retirement savings

Job summary

URBN is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the inventory management platform, architect real-time systems, and drive reliable delivery. You will own the technical roadmap, design scalable APIs, and mentor engineers while ensuring data integrity and auditability across high-throughput operations.

The role emphasizes performance, reliability, and observability, with a hands-on leadership style and collaboration with product, ops, and other engineering teams to meet business priorities.

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering experience with ownership of project delivery
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, and debugging
• Track record of taking significant system from design through production launch, including cross-team coordination
• Expert-level backend engineering in a modern language/framework with asynchronous patterns
• Deep experience with production-grade data stores, schema design, indexing, transactions, and query optimization
• Experience with distributed messaging/event-streaming systems and batch processing
• Experience operating containerized workloads in orchestrated environments (deployments, secrets management, autoscaling)
• Comprehensive testing discipline across unit, integration, behavior-driven, and performance/load testing
• Experience with inventory/supply chain/order management systems is a plus
• Preferred experience with Python

Responsibilities

• Design and own RESTful web services and APIs for real-time inventory operations at scale
• Architect asynchronous event-driven systems and streaming pipelines with proper error handling
• Implement complex domain logic with emphasis on correctness and auditability
• Design data storage schemas, indexing strategies, and query optimization for high throughput
• Design and tune caching for low-latency reads at scale
• Own testing strategy across unit, integration, behavior-driven, and performance tests
• Own performance and resiliency targets for latency and throughput
• Lead SRE-like practices: observability, alerting, capacity planning, deployment
• Establish engineering standards: static analysis, type checking, automated gates, code reviews
• Own end-to-end technical roadmap and delivery of major platform initiatives
• Coordinate across product, ops, and engineering to align with business priorities
• Mentor engineers and manage technical debt vs feature velocity
• Lead on-call support and incident response and post-incident follow-through

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

Asynchronous programming

Distributed messaging

Database design

Testing strategy

Cloud platforms

AI-assisted tooling

Inventory systems domain

Python

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

SQL

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

The Perks

URBN offers comprehensive Perks & Benefits to employees. Availability and eligibility to specific benefits may be subject to your location and employment status. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, PTO, generous employee discounts, retirement savings and much more! For additional information visit www.urbn.com/work-with-us/benefits

EEO Statement

URBN celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We are proud to provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, sex (including gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression), religion, creed, age, physical or mental disability, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, citizenship, service in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic as established by law. We believe strongly in fostering a safe, fair and respectful work environment. To ensure compliance with our non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, we offer anti-harassment training to managers and employees.