Backend Engineer

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.

Backend Software Engineer - Platform Products

Location: San Francisco, CA

We are seeking a talented and experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our team and contribute to the development of our platform products at Wholesail. In this role, you will have the opportunity to work on building and expanding our foundational accounting platform, integrating with various fintech providers, and driving new product areas and growth opportunities. As a key member of our engineering team, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, engineers, and go-to-market teams, to deliver high-quality software solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and execute a vision and strategy for the Wholesail platform, aligning with business and product objectives.
• Take ownership of Wholesail’s foundational accounting platform, collaborating with engineering teams, company leadership, and partners to unify accounting systems, AP automation systems, and fintech providers like Stripe, Plaid, and Modern Treasury.
• Lead the integration efforts and expand the integration platform to onboard new customers and partners.
• Build revenue-driving products on top of the accounting platform, such as a lockbox service with automated bookkeeping capabilities.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize features and make data-driven decisions.
• Build and maintain core platform components, services, internal/external APIs, and systems that serve both customers and the engineering staff.
• Debug production issues and provide solutions across internal services, infrastructure, and third-party services.
• Contribute to the development and improvement of engineering standards and processes.
• Oncall to oversee system maintenance and minimize impact to services and customers.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in systems engineering, building performant and reliable web-scale products.
• Quick learner on unfamiliar technologies that are used by various (potentially aged) accounting systems or ERPs.
• Experience in designing and implementing distributed systems, including message queues, caches, load balancers, or microservices.
• Solid understanding of data structures, object-oriented design, and algorithm fundamentals.
• Familiarity with database technologies, especially PostgreSQL.
• Excellent troubleshooting skills and the ability to solve performance issues in distributed systems.
• Effective written and spoken English communication skills.
• Strong teamwork and collaboration skills, promoting a healthy and supportive work environment.
• Excellent prototyping skills to validate different alternatives, check feasibility, perform pros and cons analysis.

• Background in developing backend services for user-facing services, both consumer and B2B.
• Familiarity with logging, performance monitoring, and related analysis/troubleshooting.
• Knowledge of cloud infrastructure (e.g., GCP/AWS) and DevOps practices.
• Strong discipline in unit and integration testing.
• Experience with client software deployment. E.g. deploy to customer’s devices/office servers. 

Nice to have:

• Contribution to prominent open-source projects such as PostgreSQL, Linux, Java ecosystem, or Apache.
• Experience with payment systems, internet security, or other mission-critical business software applications.

Join our team and be part of the exciting journey to redefine the trillion-dollar industry with exceptional software products. Apply now and contribute to the growth and success of Wholesail!