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

Location

Engineering

Full-Time

About The Role

About The Squad

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

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

Architecture

Our Values

Be Customer Obsessed —

Speak & Act Courageously —

Take Extreme Ownership —