Staff Software Engineer (Marketplace)

You are hiring into the Staff Software Engineer role on Zipline’s Marketplace team

This team builds the commercial engine that turns Zipline’s delivery network into a scalable business: merchant-facing portals and integrations, marketplace policy and dispatch logic, fulfillment tooling at partner locations, and the billing/settlements backbone that must be financially correct across promotions, refunds, revenue shares, and taxes

These systems run live against real missions—affecting partner operations, customer experience, and cashflow—and must operate across metros and countries with strict safety, reliability, and financial correctness constraints

This hire will be an owner/operator: shipping core services, owning production reliability and incident response, and moving product and architecture forward in a regulated, hardware-integrated logistics environment. Role may require multi-day travel to partner sites and occasional weekend or evening production support during launches

Own one or more production services end-to-end in the commerce stack (merchant portal, partner integrations, marketplace platform, billing engine, fulfillment apps, or support tooling), including design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations

Deliver measurable improvements, such as reducing merchant onboarding time by 50% within 6 months for assigned flows, bringing reconciliation variance below 0.1% month-over-month for owned payment paths, and reducing incident-driven customer-impacting downtime to under 30 minutes MTTR for priority services

Lead cross-functional launches by defining success criteria, authoring rollout and rollback plans, coordinating with Field Operations, Safety/Compliance, Product, and Finance, and owning post-launch remediation and success metrics

Build and enforce marketplace controls and policy tooling that enable operators to safely manage pricing, capacity allocation, and prioritization, including feature gates, experiment scaffolding, and pre-production simulation using historical mission data

Ship partner integrations (POS connectors, APIs, and data feeds) with clear SLAs, backpressure handling, and schema/version migration strategies, while serving as the technical lead for critical partner onboarding and incident response

Maintain observability and service reliability by defining SLOs, building monitoring and dashboards (Grafana/Honeycomb), and owning alerting thresholds, runbooks, and on-call rotations for assigned services

Mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and make durable abstraction decisions that reduce cross-product fragmentation- Operating intensity and logistics: able to support occasional off-hours launches and urgent production incidents; available for regular multi-day travel to partner sites (up to ~20% travel typical); preferred to be based near the primary office for hybrid work and rapid cross-functional coordination

Strong systems skills: production-grade API design, data modelling for ledgers, eventual consistency tradeoffs, schema migrations, and designing for idempotency and retry semantics

Tech stack experience: deep proficiency in one or more of Go, Python, or scalable backend languages; experience with React or similar for merchant-facing apps; familiarity with Kafka, gRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, observability tools (Grafana, Honeycomb), and build tooling (Bazel) is required for day-one productivity

Measured outcomes orientation: able to define and hit specific metrics (reconciliation accuracy, onboarding time, MTTR, throughput/latency targets) and to present trade-offs with data

Must-have traits: rigorous attention to correctness and edge-cases in financial flows, clear bias for measurable ownership and accountability, ability to simplify complex cross-boundary systems into durable abstractions

Must have shipped transactional commerce, payments, billing, or marketplace systems in production at scale (millions of orders/day or multi-region transactional volume), or equivalent experience operating financial reconciliation and settlements pipelines

Minimum 5+ years building and shipping production distributed systems and web applications; evidence of ownership across frontend, backend, and data/streaming pipelines

Demonstrated incident leadership: on-call experience, runbook authorship, performing post-incident root-cause analysis, and driving remediation to prevent recurrence