Principal Software Engineer

Stord is The Consumer Experience Company, powering seamless checkout through delivery for today's leading brands. Stord is rapidly growing and is on track to double our revenue in the next 18 months. To meet and exceed this target, Stord is strategically scaling teams across the entire company, and seeking energetic experts to help us achieve our mission.

By combining comprehensive commerce-enablement technology with high-volume fulfillment services, Stord provides brands a platform to compete with retail giants. Stord manages over $10 billion of commerce annually through its fulfillment, warehousing, transportation, and operator-built software suite including OMS, Pre- and Post-Purchase, and WMS platforms. Stord is leveling the playing field for all brands to deliver the best consumer experience at scale.

With Stord, brands can increase cart conversion, improve unit economics, and drive sustained customer loyalty. Stord’s end-to-end commerce solutions combine best-in-class omnichannel fulfillment and shipping with leading technology to ensure fast shipping, reliable delivery promises, easy access to more channels, and improved margins on every order.

Hundreds of leading DTC and B2B companies like AG1, True Classic, Native, Seed Health, quip, goodr, Sundays for Dogs, and more trust Stord to deliver industry-leading consumer experiences on every order. Stord is headquartered in Atlanta with facilities across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Stord is backed by top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Franklin Templeton, Founders Fund, Strike Capital, Baillie Gifford, and Salesforce Ventures.

At Stord, we believe in product-centered engineering - engineers who don't just build what they're told, but actively shape the future of our products through technical innovation and customer-focused thinking. You'll be expected to contribute meaningfully to product strategy, leveraging your technical expertise to identify new opportunities and guide product evolution.

This role will collaborate with the product development teams responsible for building, maintaining, and owning Stord's Order Management System (OMS), Transportation Management System (TMS), Warehouse Management System (WMS), and the Consumer Experience (CX) platform.

• Foundational Leadership & Technical Guidance: Opportunity for a green field project laying the foundation for an entire suite of products that drive revenue and the success of the company

• Team Building: This individual will work with Engineering leadership to build this team from the ground up

• Pivotal Role in Future of Software at Stord: This role will play an important role in building a new suite of software products here at Stord, while building a team that can maintain them

Strategic Leadership:

• Define and articulate technical vision and strategy for scalable systems, aligning with our business objectives and customer needs

• Identify and prioritize high-impact technical initiatives across OMS, Billing, WMS, and other core systems

• Work closely with product management to develop and refine the technical roadmap

• Drive architectural decisions that will scale across multiple product teams

Technical Execution:

• Write high-quality, maintainable code in Elixir/Phoenix

• Architect and implement scalable, fault-tolerant systems leveraging Elixir's concurrency model

• Build and maintain robust data pipelines for data ingestion, processing, and transformation

• Ensure the performance, reliability, and security of distributed systems

• Work hands-on with GCP cloud services and modern infrastructure practices

• Design and implement event-driven architectures and real-time systems

General Responsibilities:

• Technical Leadership: Provide technical direction and guidance to engineering teams, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices

• System Design and Architecture: Lead the design and implementation of scalable, reliable, and secure systems, while maintaining a focus on simplicity and maintainability

• Problem-Solving: Tackle complex technical challenges across the stack, driving innovation and delivering efficient solutions

• Mentorship: Guide and mentor engineers at various levels, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development. Act as a leader in the team

• Collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, and other stakeholders to define and prioritize work, ensuring the successful delivery of high-quality features

• Code Quality: Set and uphold high standards for code quality, testing, and software development practices

• Cross-Team Initiatives: Lead cross-team technical initiatives and contribute to scaling processes, tools, and technologies

Experience:

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus (in recent years) on the Elixir programming language

• Proven track record of architecting and implementing complex, distributed systems in production environments

• Strong understanding of functional programming principles and concurrent system design

• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably GCP

• Experience building data pipelines and working with large datasets

• Demonstrated ability to learn and adapt to new technologies

• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency systems

Technical Skills:

• Expert proficiency in Elixir/Phoenix and the OTP (Open Telecom Platform) ecosystem

• Strong understanding of data engineering principles and practices

• Experience with database systems, data warehousing, and event streaming platforms

• Familiarity with front-end technologies (React, TypeScript) is a plus

• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)

• Knowledge of distributed system patterns and microservices architecture

Leadership and Communication:

• Ability to define and articulate a clear technical vision

• Excellent communication skills with ability to translate technical concepts to diverse audiences

• Ability to influence and guide technical teams without direct management authority

• Ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions

• Ability to collaborate effectively with other Principal Engineers and teams across the organization

Bonus Points:

• Previous startup experience

• Previous Staff+ positions

• Previous logistics or supply chain experience

• Experience with Order Management Systems (OMS), Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), or Transportation Management Systems (TMS)

• Experience with GenServer patterns and building fault-tolerant, self-healing systems

• Experience with Phoenix LiveView and real-time web applications

• Knowledge of Erlang/OTP supervision trees and distributed Erlang clusters

• Experience with message queues and event streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)

• Experience with observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)

• Contributions to open-source Elixir projects or the broader community