Backend Engineer, Senior

Do you love enabling other development teams to ship the best version of their applications? Do you love diving deep into the internals of a system and identifying areas for iterative improvement? Does the thought of continuous integration and agile workflow encourage you to craft high-quality, well-tested, and resilient systems? Do you feel observability, security, availability, and maintainability are inextricably linked to your application’s architecture? Do you want to support products that connect thousands of food orderers to restaurants every day?

Are all() of your answers to the above  == True? If so, keep reading; this might be the product-building environment you have searched for.

About Us:

ChowNow is one of the leading players in off-premise restaurant technology. As takeout becomes a vital revenue stream for independent restaurants, our platform helps owners focus on what they do best—serving great food—by offering solutions across the entire digital dining experience. From building branded websites and mobile apps, to powering online orders, managing menus, consolidating delivery, and running targeted marketing, we give restaurants the tools to grow on their own terms.

We support over 20,000 restaurants across North America, helping process $1B+ in gross food sales while saving our partners over $700M in third-party commission fees. Through our white-label ordering solutions, a growing demand network (including Google, Yelp, Apple, and Snap), and a diner-friendly marketplace, we empower independent restaurants to own their customer relationships and avoid inflated pricing and fees charged by 3rd party delivery apps like Uber and Doordash. 

Founded in 2012, we’ve navigated rapid growth and transformation—from startup roots through the pandemic boom—and are now beginning an exciting new era under our CEO, Kanika Soni. As we evolve with new leadership and cutting-edge tools, we’re deepening our commitment to helping local restaurants thrive in the digital economy.

About the Position:

ChowNow’s Engineering Team has built a modern platform to enable restaurants to streamline their online ordering processes and create a strong digital brand. Our “quality product first” approach to engineering contributes to our success and brand recognition. We’ve reached the time when we need to grow and scale our engineering team to meet the demand of the many exciting new products and features on our roadmap.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will help build, deploy and monitor ChowNow’s BE applications. You will work closely with other disciplines to build new features with an emphasis on quality. You will work with the team on following best practices and continuously improving the development process.

Reports to a Lead Software Engineer; No Direct Reports 

This is a remote role based in the United States. Please note: ChowNow is not eligible to employ in every state and the recruiting team will confirm location and eligibility before moving past initial stages.

What We Love About You:

You put restaurants first. You deeply understand the importance of local restaurants and put them at the center of everything you do. You aim to help them not only survive but thrive.

You celebrate diversity. You recognize that diversity and inclusivity matter. You’re committed to progress, which means everyone gets the support and resources they need, no matter who they are.  You have an ability to listen to other team members' ideas and can thrive in an environment that embraces individuality. Everyone’s voice counts.

You raise your hand. You consistently go above and beyond what is asked of you. You help your peers accomplish their tasks while also excelling at accomplishing your own. When you have a smart idea, you raise your hand and share it.

You keep reaching. You set clear ambitious goals. You don’t allow yourself to become complacent with where you’re at and what you’ve done, so you seek out new opportunities and challenges.

What Success Looks Like:

• Learn our business model and how it translates to platform architecture and features. We work closely with the product and it influences how we think about the code.
• Master our development patterns and collaborative processes. We work together to make work efficient.
• Read (and write) internal documentation and proposals, and test your features and systems. We take responsibility for communication, quality, and operations.
• Grasp the basics of the platform architecture. Developers share responsibility for our always available APIs.
• Squash a bug or two from your squad’s backlog or ship a small feature to production.

• Have become an expert on your squad’s area of the platform and made an impact on it. We celebrate our success by measuring our impact, internally and externally.
• Build, launch, and support your first big release on our platform. We ship with iterative agility.
• Understand how our systems interoperate and be comfortable navigating the stack and infrastructure. We are all generalists, but we specialize in areas too.
• Have worked with others in the organization to propose and define the architecture for a major new system, optimization, or feature. We communicate and collaborate on our architecture to achieve security, scalability, and maximum learning.
• Look for opportunities to help your squad ship faster.
• Learn our business model and how it translates to our systems and services.

• Build within reliable estimates. We know this takes time, and we strive to be accurate with each other.
• Feel comfortable as an expert on your team, teaching others and continuing to learn. We want to learn as much as we teach.
• Be an essential part of growing our team by fully participating in the hiring interview process. We share the responsibility to grow our team.
• Have made at least one major cultural or process shift that improves the productivity of your squad.
• Join your squad in end-to-end ownership of a system or component and look for ways to improve and extend it.

• You have 5+ years of experience building SaaS products, e-commerce platforms, or similar online systems, with expertise in Python.
• You are excited about new technologies, are able to judge the maturity of the latest innovations, and find practical use for them
• You constantly work to get better at your craft
• You find excitement in learning new business models and transferring such knowledge into beautiful software design
• You like collaborating with multiple stakeholders within and outside the Engineering Team towards a common goal
• You embrace experimentation and make decisions based on data and evidence
• You enjoy an iterative, agile development process with frequent releases
• You take great pleasure in writing quality, highly maintainable code 
• You thrive in environments supporting your growth, and where you can support others
• You strive for constant improvement and encourage others to build quality software
• You are comfortable with transparency and open lines of communication, both within your team and with external stakeholders
• You enjoy being the “glue” between product teams and infrastructure
• You have a passion for enabling high autonomy, high judgment teams
• You are passionate about observability, process improvements, CI/CD, and deployment frequency

• Expected Base Salary Range: $169,687 - $220,500 depending on candidate location
• Ongoing training and growth opportunities.
• A "Best Place to Work" winner multiple times where we focus on creating a great employee experience.
• Rock solid medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Mental Health Coverage - we offer several programs to support your mental health and wellness goals.
• Unlimited Paid Vacation. We expect you to work hard, but still enjoy your personal life
• 7 weeks of baby bonding time for all new parents (within the first year of birth or adoption), 8 Weeks of Paid Pregnancy Leave.
• 401(k) Matching
• Employer-contributing student loan assistance program or continuing education reimbursement program
• Employee Stock Incentive Plan.
• Pet insurance for your fur babies
• Consistent & fair leadership: we’ll share info, set clear goals, show you respect, and treat everyone fairly.
• Enough freedom to spread your wings while still holding you accountable.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required.

As one of ChowNow’s core values, “Celebrates Diversity”, we are committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment. ChowNow is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.  We are committed to developing a barrier-free recruitment process and work environment, if you require any accommodation, please let us know at your earliest convenience and we’ll work with you to meet your accessibility needs.

Information Regarding Recruiting Scams: ChowNow does not engage in outreach to prospective candidates by text message about employment opportunities, interviews, or employment offers, and we do not make job offers after only one interview. ChowNow does not ask candidates to submit sensitive personal information (Passport details, banking information, etc.) as part of the interview process. ChowNow employment offers are made by a ChowNow Talent Acquisition team member with a @chownow.com email address only. ChowNow does not ask candidates to provide funds to the company for onboarding, equipment, or supplies. If you receive an employment inquiry or employment offer from a non @chownow.com email address, consider it spam.

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