Senior Software Engineer - API Systems

The Engineering team at Book of the Month is responsible for developing and maintaining our website, mobile apps, and the internal systems that run the business. We work closely with Product, Design, fellow engineers, and stakeholders across the company to take projects from inception to launch on quick, iterative timelines, balancing quality with business impact.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to architect creative technical solutions to complex problems, ensure consistent delivery of roadmapped features, and seek constant improvement of our code’s efficacy, performance, and maintainability.
 

What you will do…

• Own the end-to-end creation of customer-facing features that reach hundreds of thousands of users.
• Architect and maintain the systems that power Book of the Month, such as our inventory, order management, financial, and fulfillment systems, applying evolving technologies to best support our internal teams.
• Keep our APIs, website, and mobile apps fast and reliable through spiky, unpredictable traffic from monthly selection launches, promotions, and holiday gifting.
• Collaborate closely with technical and non-technical stakeholders to find practical, cost-effective solutions that meet business needs in feasible timelines.
• Create detailed, comprehensive technical specifications outlining well thought-out solutions for review by peers & execution by orchestrated agentic workflows.
• Review technical specifications of other developers to ensure success of their projects along with your own, mentoring other engineers to architect for scalability, follow good design patterns, and uncover edge cases.
• Write code and direct code generation to implement approved solutions at high code-quality standards.
• Verify solutions at every step of the development process, considering both happy and unhappy paths, & monitoring success after release.

About you…

• 6+ years of work experience delivering high-quality production code. Experience at a consumer facing brand is a plus.
• Solution-oriented: Enjoys tackling problems, breaking them down into pieces, and finding innovative ways to use new technologies to solve them.
• Excited by ownership: Embraces the prospect of creating something from scratch, owning its development, and ensuring its quality to end users.
• Undeterred by ambiguity: Sees complex problems as opportunities for growth rather than obstacles, driving a solution forward no matter how complicated the path. 
• Team player: Collaborates with others and picks up new skills to help out when needed, whether that be nailing down reproduction steps of a bug, creating a frontend component, or hunting down a gap in our data for analytics.

Technical Requirements…

• Develop high-quality, production code in event-driven systems, preferably Node.js.
• Utilize typed languages, preferably TypeScript, to ensure integrity of API contracts, store clean data, and future-proof projects for low-lift expansion while avoiding regressions.
• Model data in relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL and evolve schemas safely against live production data.
• Design and version REST APIs with clear, reliable contracts and consistent backward compatibility.
• Build and maintain test suites rigorous enough to be trusted as a quality gate for production release.
• Prioritize efficiency by optimizing SQL, minimizing DB trips, managing in-memory load, and utilizing third-party services such as Redis, Kafka, and SQS.