About Wholesail

Wholesail is an early stage startup that builds software to connect wholesalers and their buyers by automating and digitizing invoicing and payment in the $5 trillion wholesale trade industry. The company’s first product is an electronic invoicing and payment portal for wholesale sellers, which allows them to get paid faster and decrease losses. For buyers, Wholesail automates the accounts payable & expense management process to save them time and money. Wholesail’s initial industry focus is to build a network effect driven payment business in the highly fragmented $1 trillion US food distribution market, in which invoicing and payment is nearly entirely paper-driven today. The platform has gained great traction with early customers since its launch in mid-2019, with over 25% month-over-month growth in Gross Transaction Volume (GTV), and has a significant customer pipeline that’s gated on new feature development.

Wholesail was founded by a team of successful serial entrepreneurs whose prior startups were acquired by OpenTable and who worked together there as product managers, engineers and designers. The company is well funded with backing from a half dozen venture capital firms and 20+ angel investors with backgrounds in FinTech, Payments, SMB Marketplaces, food distribution and restaurants; including early executives and team members from Stripe, Square, Dropbox, Yelp, OpenTable and Everlane.

Role:

The company is looking to add to its team of senior backend engineers to accelerate its roll-out with new customers and expand the breadth of its product offering. Wholesail’s backend engineering team has three core areas of responsibility: building customer facing features alongside the frontend team, building internal tools and infrastructure, and integrating with third party services to allow Wholesail to onboard new customers. 

You will:

• Build and maintain core platform components, services, internal/external APIs and systems that serve both customers as well as the Wholesail engineering staff.
• Own the delivery and success of critical new customer facing systems and features.
• Develop code for Wholesail’s projects and lead architectural design, trade-offs, and risk-mitigation considerations.
• Work with engineering, product, design and sales counterparts to scope new features.
• Build tools for monitoring, alerting and reporting.
• Debug production issues across internal services, infrastructure and 3rd party services.
• Develop and iterate on engineering standards processes as an early team member.
• Support a 24/7 operation by overseeing and executing system maintenance, minimizing impact to services and customers.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 4+ years of systems engineering experience building performant and reliable web-scale products.
• Strong experience with modern web technologies and programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, JSON, Unix/Linux, etc.).
• Experience designing and implementing distributed systems that elegantly solve complex problems (e.g. message queues, caches, load balancers or microservices).
• Solid understanding of data structures, OO design, and algorithms fundamentals.
• Strong understanding of database technologies (especially PostgreSQL).
• Great troubleshooting skills, with the ability to find and solve performance issues and other tricky emergent phenomena in distributed systems.
• Excellent written and spoken English communication skills; ability to influence others with your ideas.
• The spirit of a team player who believes in fostering a healthy and supportive work environment.
• BA or BS in Computer Science, Mathematics, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Additional Qualifications:

• 7+ years systems engineering or application development experience in Java.
• Experience building highly performant and highly available systems.
• Deep understanding of the JVM, performance and heap/memory management.
• Experience building backend services for user facing services (consumer or B2B).
• Experience with logging, performance monitoring, and related analysis / troubleshooting.
• Experience with payment systems, internet security or other mission critical business software applications.
• Experience contributing to a prominent OSS project such as PostgreSQL, Linux, Linux distributions, Java ecosystem or Apache.
• Experience building and maintaining cloud infrastructure (e.g. GCP / AWS) and DevOps.
• Discipline at unit and integration testing.

Engineering Culture & Environment

At Wholesail, we started as a team of senior engineers who are passionate about using technology to build products and tools to improve the lives of buyers and sellers in the wholesale industry. Many of us have a background working on technologies used in the relevant food and payments industries, and together with our cross-functional partners, we strive to learn about the problems that our customers in the wholesale industry are facing, so we can work hard to provide solutions for our buyers and sellers.  

Wholesail provides products that help our customers make payments and process orders, which are essential to our customers’ business, and therefore we have a strong focus on security, reliability and system performance. We emphasize good engineering practices, and adopt test-driven development and continuous deployment to iterate quickly and confidently. We identify and eliminate or mitigate the impact of single points of failure in our systems. We also genuinely take pride in the craftsmanship of the code we produce, and we love to work with colleagues whose work we respect. Intermixed with all of this is a sense of good humor, and an earnest enjoyment in working together.

Wholesail’s tech stack starts with Java services running in Kubernetes (GKE on Google Cloud Platform), with PostgreSQL as the database. The frontend is a React-Native / React-Native-Web single page application that is served statically.  The Wholesail platform integrates with third party services and APIs, including Plaid, Stripe, Modern Treasury and QuickBooks, among other systems. Given the financial and accounting nature of the product, the company has invested in extensive testing infrastructure. In addition to more traditional automated testing, we built orchestration that provisions independent copies of the entire service architecture with candidate releases to test the system, end-to-end, before rolling out new changes.