Senior Software Engineer, Fullstack

At Thrive Market, Product Engineering builds the systems members touch every day, from the home page through checkout, account, and renewal. You'll work closely with Product, Design, and Data to ship features that drive real outcomes for our members and the business.

We are not looking for a programmer or a language specialist, we are looking for an engineer. Someone with strong CS fundamentals, great OO, great relational data modeling, and a systems mindset. Someone who reaches for architecture, patterns, and platforms before they reach for syntax, and who picks the right tool for the job rather than the one they know best. Communication is concise and high-level; orientation is big-picture without losing the details that matter.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own the architecture and evolution of your pod's systems end-to-end.
• Make system-level calls on when to introduce eventing (Kafka, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), caching, async pipelines, or new services, and when not to.
• Design for horizontal scale and low, uniform latency under real Thrive traffic patterns.
• Decompose existing services into scalable components where it materially helps; avoid decomposition for its own sake.
• ie engineering decisions to outcomes. Instrument what you build; defend what you ship with data.
• Test-driven from the start. Quality, reliability, and observability are first-class, not afterthoughts.
• Bring Product and Design options and a recommendation, not a single path.
• Raise the bar on the team's architectural and systems thinking: mentor, review, challenge, elevate.
• Own the SLAs for the surfaces your pod runs.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years building and operating high-traffic, customer-facing systems.
• Strong CS fundamentals. Strong object-oriented design. Strong relational database design and reasoning.
• Fluency at the system and cloud level: eventing (Kafka, SNS, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), distributed systems tradeoffs, caching, async pipelines, idempotency, backpressure.
• Comfort working across multiple languages and stacks; language is a tool, not an identity. Our stack today includes PHP/Magento on the backend and React/Next on the frontend, on AWS; the right hire is comfortable moving between layers.
• Working knowledge of AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, SQS, etc.) and clear reasoning about tradeoffs between relational, document, and wide-column stores.
• Track record of shipping high-impact, customer-facing features in production at scale.
• Communicates concisely and at the right altitude; defaults to options + recommendation, not exhaustive detail.
• Big-picture orientation. Reasons about systems and outcomes; does not get lost in syntax.
• Member-first. Prioritizes Customer, Team, and Business consistently.
• Observability and monitoring experience (New Relic, Datadog, or similar) to maintain SLA, Apdex, and error rate.