Senior Software Development Engineer III (SDE 3) – Backend | E-commerce Platform

About This Role

Senior Software Development Engineer 3 (SDE 3)

Ordering Applications Squad

Location: Dubai, UAE | Function: Engineering | Type: Full-Time | Experience: 7–10 years

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are building one of the region's most ambitious e-commerce platforms: high-traffic, multi-region, and engineered for scale. As a Backend Engineer at Lulu, you will own critical systems that millions of customers depend on every day, from product discovery through to delivery.

You define how systems are built, not just what gets built. You own multi-quarter, multi-team goals, drive technical strategy, and set the standard for engineering excellence within and beyond your team.

ABOUT THE SQUAD

The Ordering Applications squad owns the critical path from product selection to purchase confirmation. Our systems handle payment orchestration, cart management, checkout flows, and promotional engines that directly drive revenue for Lulu's e-commerce platform. Every transaction flows through our stack, so reliability, speed, and correctness are non-negotiable.

Core services: Payments, Cart, Checkout, Promotions

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

• Design and build transactional backend services for cart, checkout, and payment orchestration with strong consistency guarantees
• Integrate with third-party payment gateways and fraud detection systems, ensuring PCI compliance and secure handling of sensitive data
• Build and maintain the promotions engine, supporting complex discount rules, coupon management, and dynamic pricing at scale
• Architect idempotent payment flows that gracefully handle retries, partial failures, and reconciliation across distributed systems
• Develop high-throughput APIs that support real-time cart updates, price calculations, and inventory reservation under peak traffic
• Drive observability across the ordering pipeline with structured logging, distributed tracing, and real-time alerting on transaction health
• Collaborate with product, finance, and fraud teams to translate business requirements into robust, scalable backend solutions

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Scope & Impact

• Own and deliver multi-quarter, multi-team product or platform goals, defining technical solutions that level up the entire team
• Make independent technical decisions in the face of open-ended requirements, with a deep understanding of business context and customer needs
• Drive cross-team or cross-discipline initiatives, optimizing beyond your immediate team for broader organizational impact

Technical Craft

• Design the software and systems in your area of ownership, ensuring they meet their design objectives and align with longer-term business needs
• Handle complex software modules that are logically dense — whether from business, idempotence, robustness, or scalability requirements
• Simplify code and infrastructure, prioritizing tasks that measurably reduce maintenance and migration costs
• Preemptively identify and resolve technical risks before they jeopardize projects; resolve cross-team dependencies early
• Debug and reproduce non-deterministic bugs and system issues that would normally escape less experienced engineers
• Champion an AI-first engineering culture — actively adopt and advocate for AI tools and assistants to maximize productivity, accelerate delivery, and multiply your team's impact

Leadership & Strategy

• Define the technical roadmap for complex projects, provide leadership for those executing on it, and generate excitement for the team's strategy
• Set and hold the bar for quality and best practices via code and design reviews
• Act as a Culture Leader — partner with your manager to set the cultural tone, foster psychological safety, and champion inclusive practices
• Coach and mentor teammates, offering direct and actionable feedback delivered with empathy to help others grow into the next level
• Represent Lulu's mission, strategy, and technical challenges to candidates in a compelling way

MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS

These are non-negotiable. We need engineers who can hit the ground running with our stack and ways of working.

• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Python, Java, or Node.js, with deep understanding of language internals and performance characteristics
• Proven track record of designing, building, and operating microservices architectures at scale in production
• Deep experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) including architecture decisions, cost optimization, and multi-region deployments
• Expert-level knowledge of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) in production environments
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies (blue-green, canary), and automated quality gates
• Advanced database skills: query optimization, sharding strategies, replication, and data modeling for high-throughput systems
• Extensive experience with event-driven architectures and message brokers (Kafka, SQS/SNS, Pub/Sub) at scale
• Deep understanding of caching layers (Redis, Memcached, CDN) and their role in system performance and reliability
• Strong grasp of API security, OAuth 2.0, JWT, API gateway patterns, and WAF configurations
• Domain experience in e-commerce, retail, logistics, supply chain, or similar high-traffic consumer platforms — you understand the business domain, not just the technology

NICE-TO-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS

These will set you apart and accelerate your impact, but aren't required on day one.

• Experience leading technical design reviews and architectural decision records (ADRs) for cross-team systems
• Track record of driving large-scale migrations, platform re-architecture, or system decomposition projects
• Hands-on experience with observability at scale: custom metrics, distributed tracing, SLO/SLI frameworks, and incident management
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) and platform engineering practices
• Background in high-stakes transactional systems: payment processing, order management, or warehouse/logistics platforms
• Public contributions: conference talks, technical blog posts, open-source maintainership

TECH STACK

Languages: Python (Django), Node.js, Java

Architecture: Microservices, distributed systems, API-first

Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL

Caching: Redis, Memcached, CDN (CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai)

Cloud: GCP (GKE, BigQuery, Cloud Run), Azure, AWS

Messaging: Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, Google Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ

Containers: Docker, Kubernetes

CI/CD: Jenkins, GitHub Actions

Observability: New Relic, ELK Stack, PagerDuty

Security: JWT, OAuth 2.0, API Gateway, WAF

OUR VALUES

At Lulu, our values aren't wall decorations — they guide how we work, hire, and grow.

Be Customer Obsessed — Every decision in service of the customer's success.

Speak & Act Courageously — Challenge the status quo, take calculated risks, and advocate for new ideas.

Take Extreme Ownership — Nothing is someone else's problem. Uphold excellence and accountability.

Learn Voraciously — Growth mindset, curiosity, and continuous improvement.

Move with Focus & Urgency — Identify the highest-impact work and move fast.

Win as One Team — Celebrate wins, lend a hand, and invest in each other's growth