Technical Lead

About Howl

Howl is the creator platform for social commerce. We build tools for brands and creators to sell more products across every social platform, together.

In the last 10 years, the $20bn influencer ecommerce market has become a critical part of the retail industry. Social commerce is a new $1.2 trillion market opportunity (link) and requires new tools, protocols, and technologies.

Howl allows creators and brands to run experiments on what products to talk about and how best to talk about them. Paired with data delivered at the speed of social, creator financing for products, and feedback loops delivered in a beautifully designed platform, Howl takes the guesswork out of selling products on social platforms.

Howl’s mission is to reduce barriers for creators and brands to build social commerce businesses. We are a remote-first company with a diverse team that reflects our vision. Our 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.

• Lead one or more engineering squads that focus on creating the web and mobile Creator platform. 
• Has experience, expertise, and passion for creating exceptional workflows and user experience.  
• Demonstrate expertise in modern software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• Through cloud-based developer environments, CI/CD infrastructure, and developer tools, implement innovative solutions and deliver excellent code and products to our customers with speed and minimal friction.
• At times, able to roll up the sleeves, be hands on coding and create great code. 
• Guide design and development. Keep complex projects on track and sustainably implemented.
• Enforce the creation & structure of documentation consistently.
• Effectively communicate complex features & systems in detail.
• Act as part engineering manager and part product manager to ensure the understanding of user needs in order to make good priority decision.
• Passion for understanding industry & company-wide trends to help assess & develop new products.
• Suggest, collect, synthesize and refine initiatives and requirements.
• Drive resource allocation, capacity and roadmap planning.
• Drive collaboration across functions (understands how, when, and with whom to communicate across the organization to achieve their goals); identify blockers; can challenge key assumptions.
• Partner & collaborate with organization leaders to help improve the level of performance of the team & organization.
• As an engineering manager and leader, you’ll coach and develop the team, providing regular feedback, and helping each individual to learn, grow and develop their career.
• Proactively identify risks for production issues and works with stakeholders to resolve them. 
• You’ll help shape an environment which values exploration and continuous learning. You’ll influence and provide feedback on the organizational culture and processes, always looking for opportunities to improve in a continuous pursuit for excellence. 

• A successful candidate will have substantial experience working in high-tech and Agile software development teams.
• A successful candidate will be proficient in modern web development and mobile development (React, ReactNative, NextJs, GraphQL)
• Experience in shipping products to lots of customers or have started a new line of product
• 10+ years of experience in programming languages (Python, C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Typescript) with a technical background.
• Experience doing project management
• Experience collaborating and communicating across functions to drive solutions.
• Experience collaborating with/mentoring/influencing senior engineers.
• Familiarity with AWS is a plus.
• Experience in AdTech, Ecommerce or FinTech is good to have

• Bachelor's degree, or higher, in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• A bachelor’s or better degree in a STEM discipline plus substantial software engineering experience.

Howl’s systems are implemented as microservices 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, Nextjs, GarphQL, and Overmind. We use Linux and in particular, Debian, Ubuntu, and Alpine distros.

Our favorite programming languages are Python 3, Scala, Go, Elixir, and, of course, TypeScript and JavaScript.  We stash our code on GitHub.

We test each language with an appropriate unit testing tool - Cypress JUnit, PyTest, ScalaTest, ExUnit, and Jasmine.  We use Jenkins and GitHub to run our builds and tests.

We keep some data in Snowflake, some in Postgres, others in DynamoDB, and some, in MySQL.  We build our product graph using Elasticache.  We are working to reduce the number of databases we rely on.

We stream data around using Kafka, Spark, and Storm.  Maybe we will prune this list sometime.

We are not hostile to commercial software - we use AirTable, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Hasura, Vercel, Looker, Matomo, and many more.

Important Notice: Howl is a fully remote organization! 

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.