Principal Software Engineer

About Howl

Howl is a new marketplace designed for creators and brands who crave transparent collaboration.

In the last 10 years, the $20bn influencer ecommerce market has become a critical part of the retail industry. It has evolved into social commerce, a new $1.2 trillion market opportunity (link) requiring new tools, protocols, and technologies for the creator economy. Howl’s tools are designed for humans who know that scale and growth come from working together with consistency and transparency. Howl makes it easy, reliable and motivating to earn even more. That’s what makes Howl the home planet for creator-led growth.

Howl is a remote-first company with a diverse team that reflects our vision. Our private beta launched in mid-2022 and powers social commerce for creators and brands across beauty, gaming, home, fashion, and consumer electronics for both industry leaders like Best Buy, Samsung, Target and cult favorites like Cariuma, Kosas, and Youth to the People. We are a Series A company backed by investors including HighlandX and NEA. 

For more information, visit www.planethowl.com.

About the Role

Howl is looking to hire senior engineers at the Principal level that are bar-raisers. You are customer experience focused, a strategic contributor across design and product and you strive to build with craftsmanship at the forefront. 

As an engineer, you'll have a direct impact on the customer experience for creators and brands alike. You will work on building the core interaction our clients have with the Howl platform. These interactions include workflows like, helping creators and brands discover each other, building tools that allow creators to monetize their social content, get paid on time, and optimize for a brand’s performance marketing campaigns. You'll also surface new workflows or existing ones that help optimize the usage and efficiency of our platform. This role is an owner of business goals and key objectives. 

You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will:

• Provide technical and design leadership within an engineering team
• Master the code base, toolchain, and development processes
• Work with the product and design teams for scoping, design and implementation
• Design software components and subsystems for Howl's products or infrastructure and identify when we need to scale or move away from legacy systems
• Implement high-quality software components and subsystems with your team
• Write technical documents that imposes the logic and assumptions for decision making
• May serve as tech lead (player-coach) of an implementation team.
• Drive implementation of automated testing for your components.
• Contribute to refinement and enrichment of development tools and processes
• Participate in risk analysis and risk management exercises with engineering leadership

We’re Excited About You Because You Bring:

• Atleast 10 years building consumer/customer facing apps
• Javascript is a primarily language for you
• Familiarity with databases (e.g. MySQL, Snowflake).
• Dedication to keep up with new developments in tech
• Strong communication and organizational skills, motivation to achieve results in a dynamic, fast-paced environment
• Strong design intuition led by building Hi-Fi customer experiences 
• You are an owner, you are curious and start with why vs. how

Howl Tech Stack

One of the most frequent questions asked by candidates of Howl engineers is, “What is your tech stack?” This is a brief overview of our tech stack.

• Howl's systems are implemented as a modern microservices architecture running on Linux servers hosted in AWS. We use Kubernetes to manage our containers, we use Flask to construct our Web interfaces. We build interactivity in our web interfaces using React. 
• Our favorite programming languages are Python 3, Go, Elixir, and, on the frontend, TypeScript and JavaScript. We stash our code in GitHub.
• We test each language with an appropriate unit testing tool - PyTest, Cypress, and Jasmine. We use Jenkins to run our builds and tests.
• Check-ins against the main branch require a code review by another SWE.
• We keep some data in Snowflake, some in Postgres and Elasticsearch and some, of course, in MySQL. We build our product graph using Neptune. We are working to reduce the number of databases we rely on.
• We stream data around using Kafka, and Storm. Maybe we will prune/update this list sometime.
• We are not hostile to commercial software - we use DBT, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Looker, Notion.

The base salary range for this role is $220,000/yr - $250,000/yr USD.

At Howl, we offer a competitive compensation package inclusive of base salary, incentive pay and stock options. Incentive awards are allocated based on individual performance. Certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role. 

Howl is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or veteran status.