Software Development Lead - Marketplace

We’re hiring a Software Development Lead - the most senior hands-on engineer on our customer-facing product.

This is an IC+ role. You’ll write code, set technical direction, and own the systems that power the buyer experience end to end: auctions, website/app, notifications, search, and personalization. You’ll be the person who makes the marketplace fast, reliable, and addictive - and who raises the technical bar for everyone building alongside you.

You won’t inherit a finished product. You’ll shape it. We have a foundation and momentum; we need a builder who can take the marketplace to the next level.

We’re looking for someone who is:

• A hands-on builder first - you ship, and your code sets the standard
• Product-minded - you care why a feature exists, not just how to build it
• Obsessed with the customer experience - speed, polish, and delight matter to you
• AI-forward - you use modern tools to move faster and build smarter

WHAT YOU’LL OWN

Real-Time Auctions

• Own the auction engine that powers live bidding - real-time, accurate, and rock-solid under load
• Handle the hard problems: concurrency, bid integrity, race conditions, and the spikes that come with a live marketplace
• Partner with Data on auction design, demand signals, and pricing

Website & App

• Lead development of the buyer-facing web and mobile experience (Vue/Nuxt front end, Python/C# services)
• Make it fast, intuitive, and fun - the treasure hunt should feel like a treasure hunt
• Own performance, reliability, and the release process for the product customers touch every day

Search & Discovery

• Build search that helps people find - and stumble onto - items they’ll love, across a constantly changing, one-of-a-kind inventory
• Tune relevance, ranking, and browse for a catalog where no two items are alike

Personalization

• Turn browse ? bid ? win ? pickup behavior into a personalized experience
• Partner with Data to surface the right items to the right customer at the right moment

Notifications & Engagement

• Own the notification systems (push, email, in-app) that bring customers back - outbid alerts, auction endings, new drops
• Build engagement loops that drive the daily habit without becoming noise

Technical Leadership (hands-on)

• Set the technical direction, architecture, and quality bar for marketplace engineering
• Mentor other engineers through code review, design, and example
• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy-vs-integrate calls and own the outcomes
• Partner closely with Product, Data, and Warehouse/Ops engineering to keep the full experience aligned, This one is different. Our inventory is chaotic and one-of-a-kind, our auctions are live, and our customers come for the hunt. You’ll own the systems that turn that into a daily habit - and you’ll have the autonomy and equity of someone shaping a category-defining product from the ground up.

• 6+ years building and shipping consumer-facing web/mobile products at scale
• Deep hands-on strength across the stack - comfortable owning both front end and backend services
• Experience with real-time systems - live auctions, bidding, feeds, or similar high-concurrency products
• Experience with marketplaces, auctions, or high-concurrency consumer apps
• Search / relevance or recommendation / personalization systems experience
• Notification and engagement / lifecycle systems at scale
• A track record of leading technically as the senior builder - through code and architecture, not just meetings
• Strong product instincts and an eye for customer experience, performance, and polish
• A strong point of view on how AI is reshaping product engineering
• Ability to move fast in a 0?1 / high-growth environment with imperfect requirements

Our stack: C#/Python, FastAPI, Vue/Nuxt, PostgreSQL, real-time event streams. You don’t need every one, but you should be dangerous across most of it.

Pulled from the full job description 401(k) Vision insurance Dental insurance Unlimited paid time off, * Competitive salary + performance bonuses

• Meaningful equity in a category-defining company
• Health, Vision & Dental Insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Annual Company Offsites
• 401K