Senior Backend Engineer

At Zowie, we believe that buying online should feel like walking into your favorite local shop: personal, friendly, and easy. Our mission is to recreate offline shopping experiences online - but better.

Zowie brings speed and empathy to customer interactions. Our platform automates responses to repetitive questions around return policy, order status, etc., and saves time for customer service agents, who can then proactively turn website visitors into paying customers. It can work as an add-on with existing tools (Zendesk, Shopify, Gorgias, etc.) or become a standalone customer service platform.

We are:

🚀 Growing fast. Growing fast. We plan on keeping the Team growing! You’ll have a lot of autonomy and impact as we grow.

🏈 Like a sports team. We take ownership of our work and believe in personal accountability. At the same time, we work together, support each other, and focus on winning as a team.

🧑‍💻 Remote-first and hours are flexible. We allow everyone to figure out the best ways to collaborate with their team. It’s about delivering, not about reporting hours. Those in Poland can work from our offices in Krakow and Warsaw.

We strive to be:

💪 Ambitious and innovative. We don’t settle on existing solutions and keep looking for better ways to tackle challenges.

👻 Bold and free-thinking. We trust our employees to find the best solutions.

🤸‍♀️ Agile and high-performing. We work smarter, not harder. We use our OKRs to keep ourselves focused.

🤠 Unafraid of change. Zowie is growing quickly. We thrive in an ever-evolving environment.

What you'll do:

You will be joining our team as the 5th or 6th Backend Engineer. But don’t be fooled by the size! We are able to maintain and innovate around the system of more than 100 microservices, usually written in Scala, that communicates synchronously via gRPC, run asynchronous calls via Kafka, expose GraphQL to frontend, and use PostgreSQL, Mongo, ElasticSearch, or Redis to store the data.

We are strongly driven by the impact our work brings to the people who use our product. Engineering, for us, is not just about writing code that fulfills all of the requirements provided by someone else. On the contrary, as an engineer, you should have a solid say on the overall solution. Of course, it requires understanding the business, the product, and the technology you are working with. It’s important that you will be able to connect the dots and, as an expert, advise the best course of action.

We also value autonomy and strive for meritocracy. Good arguments should win. You will shape the e2e solution, decide on architecture, and suggest important improvements to the way we engineer our product.

Daily, we work as most of the Engineering teams do. The thing that will be constant is Retrospective, as it will never remove itself from the process. We believe in adapting to change and being agile.

You can expect regular planning, some form of standups, timely code reviews, and very close collaboration with other engineers.

We will be happy to be fully transparent with you; tell us what you want to know!

Ideally, you'll bring with you:

 ☑ Excellent coding skills and passion for growing the expertise

 ☑ 3+ years of experience with Scala or other JVM languages

 ☑ Excellent knowledge of SQL and relational databases

 ☑ Strong communication, so you can actively listen and easily explain complex technical issues with simple business and product words

 ☑ Product acumen, ownership, and focus on value delivered for the customers

 ☑ Working proficiency in English and Polish (both spoken and written)

It'll be awesome if you have = nice-to-have:

 ☑ Experience with Distributed systems

 ☑ Experience with NoSQL databases

 ☑ Experience with Kafka or other message brokers

 ☑ Experience with Akka framework

 ☑ Experience with functional programming libraries like Cats, Fs2, ZIO, Http4s, etc.

 ☑ Experience with GraphQL

 ☑ Experience with Kubernetes & AWS

We will offer you:

👉 Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP). You’re a part of our company’s future success.

👉 Unlimited paid time off. We trust each other and don’t count days.

👉 Great company offsites and individual integration budgets. We spend time together in person to strengthen our team.

👉 Health benefits. We offer an additional health insurance package.

👉 Development budget. We want to grow personally and professionally together.

👉 Home-office funds. Make yourself a comfy space for work on a daily basis.

Sounds like you can join Zowie's Product Team as our Senior Backend Engineer? Apply or reach out directly to us - see you at the recruitment call! 🚀