Principal Engineer

Open to remote candidates but only within the US***

About Shift

We believe car buying should be fun, fair, and accessible to everyone. We’ve set out to transform an industry, using technology to bring transparency and convenience to the car buying process. And we aren’t stopping there. We seek to bring that same openness and simplicity to car ownership too, with payments, maintenance, and insurance in one easy app. At Shift, we’re building the tools that empower people to buy, own, and sell the cars that make life go.

About The Role

Engineers at Shift build things that matter and have a material impact to the company’s bottom line and the customer’s experience. In this role, you will drive exciting, meaningful projects, and help define our technical and product strategy. We move fast, have fun, and help each other out.

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to help us build the world's best e-commerce and operations platform to drive car sales. As a senior technical leader, you are critical to our business and technical prowess. You will work directly with technical management at the company and raise the bar for Engineering, in code, quality and system design. You lead by example and foster a culture of technical excellence, humility and lifelong learning.

This is an opportunity to join a fantastic team at a hi-tech fast-paced Silicon Valley company which is transforming an entire industry. You will report to the SVP of Engineering. We’d love to talk to you about what great things you’ll do here.

What You'll Do:

• Be a key contributor to Shift’s tech stack and technical processes, working with engineers throughout the organization, partnering with Data Science and TechOps.
• Demonstrate best practices by delivering high quality testable maintainable code.
• Provide technical leadership for engineers with supportive but candid feedback in code reviews and architecture documents.
• Get core technology projects on the company roadmap.
• Drive cross-team decisions to advance the tech stack and improve development velocity, quality, performance, and security.
• Participate in build v buy decisions.
• Participate in technical design, project planning and lead development of critical projects.

What We Ask For:

• An undying passion for computers, web technologies and an optimistic attitude to make things better.
• 10+ years building technically complex software for the web.
• Experience with Go is a must. Varied experience with functional and object oriented programming in many languages such as Ruby, Python, C/C++, Java, PHP.
• Experience developing SPAs and server-side rendered web-apps. You should know when to use which approach and be able to teach others. Experience with React and jQuery is a must. Typescript experience will set you apart.
• Strong experience with Postgres.
• Experience with deploying to AWS, GCP and using CDNs.
• Experience with monitoring and instrumentation tech and vendors such as Segment, New Relic, Datadog, Pingdom and PagerDuty.
• MS or PhD in Computer Science.

Nice To Have:

• Experience working in e-commerce.
• Experience building a platform.
• Familiarity with CRMs such as Salesforce Sales Cloud.
• Familiarity with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Revel.
• Experience working at a startup.

On diversity

Our company depends on balance and equality — between buyers and sellers, among employees, and in our relationships with customers.

Our mission to evolve car ownership and transform an industry is a challenging one. It can only be achieved by a team of diverse problem-solvers — engineers, designers, business people — from the same broad demographics as our customers.

Why join now?

We’ve built a small but highly talented team backed by >$275 million in funding from investors like DFJ, Goldman Sachs, BMW, and Nissan. In October 2018 we announced a deep partnership and a $140m round led by the third largest auto retailer in the US, Lithia Motors. With strong product-market fit and a great business in California, the next two years will be focused on scaling the business nationally.

Shift is the Bay Area’s #1 seller of used cars with $150 million in cars sold per year. We’re serving most of California and are gearing up to scale to new markets. With a solid business model and no clear winner in our space yet, this is a hugely exciting time to join the team.

Shift is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law.