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:

Do you like working on tooling and building things that help other developers? Keep reading!

You'll join our platform team as a first Backend Engineer. The team is led by Grzesiek (Zowie's Group Technical Lead) and currently have two Dev-Ops onboard. We want to expand this teams responsibility to focus even more on the mission of improving developers efficiency. You are going to play crucial role in it.

Don't be misled by our size! Despite being compact, we manage and enhance a sophisticated system comprising over 100 microservices, predominantly coded in Scala. These microservices communicate synchronously through gRPC, handle asynchronous calls via Kafka, expose GraphQL to the frontend, and leverage databases like PostgreSQL, Mongo, ElasticSearch, or Redis.

At Zowie, our engineering ethos is centered around the tangible impact our work has on our users. In this role, your direct customer will be people inside the company, but in the end we built it to more efficiently deliver the value to our customers.

We believe in the empowerment of our engineers to contribute not only to code but also to the strategic decisions that shape our product. This requires a holistic understanding of the business, the product, and the technology at play. Your expertise will enable you to connect the dots and provide valuable insights and guide the best course of action.

Autonomy and meritocracy are at the core of our values. We champion the idea that sound, arguments should prevail. As part of the team, you'll be instrumental in shaping end-to-end solutions, influencing architecture decisions, and proposing crucial enhancements to our engineering practices.

Since you are going to work with internal teams and improve their lives, your daily routing will require jumping into their shoes, understanding their needs and building platform solutions that can really bring a lasting difference. You will prioritise the work mainly together with Grzesiek and our two backend tech leads.

I know this is not really covering everything. I'm sure you have more questions. Let's have an open discussion during the interview process—I'm committed to transparency, and I hope for the same authenticity from you. Looking forward to our collaboration! 🚀

Ideally, you'll bring with you:

• Excellent coding skills and passion for growing the expertise
• 5+ years of experience with Scala or other JVM languages
• Strong communication, so you can actively listen and easily explain complex technical issues with simple business and product words
• Excellent system design skills that allow you to choose technologies and architectures wisely
• Experience with Distributed systems
• Product acumen, ownership, and focus on value delivered for the customers (who for this role are other developers)
• Working proficiency in English and Polish (both spoken and written)

It will be awesome if you have:

• Experience with Python
• Experience working in the platform teams
• Experience with NoSql databases
• Experience with SQL and relational 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 Docker Swarm / Kubernetes

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! 🚀