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# Senior Software Engineer, Back-End (San Francisco)

- **Company:** Short Story
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $150,000.0 - $200,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Code Review, Continuous Integration, Data Infrastructure, Data Structures, Relational Databases, Software Debugging, Distributed Systems, Python (Programming Language), PostgreSQL, Standard Sql, Software Engineering, Web Application Frameworks, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Reliability of Systems, Backend, Build Management, Containerization, Front End Software Development, Docker
- **Published:** October 22, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.thejobnetwork.com/job/54542922-ac0e-4706-bd95-4596874537cf/senior-software-engineer-backend-san-francisco

## About the Role

* 5+ years of software development experience, 2+ Years of Python experience
 * 5+ years of experience with data structures and algorithms
 * Familiar with infrastructure, monitoring, and CI/CD practices
 * Familiar with the following technologies:
 + A Python web framework
 + Testing frameworks
 + Containerized workloads (Docker)
 + Relational database (Postgres preferred) and SQL
 * Focus on communication and documentation
 * Experience designing stable, scalable, and well-documented APIs

Preferred qualifications:

 * Test-driven development (TDD) experience
 * Tech Lead for an engineering team of 3+ people
 * Proven track record running large-scale distributed systems
 * Worked in sprint-based environments

## Description

What happens when your business model breaks the assumptions most e-commerce platforms were built on?

You build your own.

At Short Story, we're rethinking how online shopping works: from inventory and logistics to personalization and fit, because the standard playbook doesn't work for our customers. That means building systems that don't fit neatly into existing patterns.

If you're excited by designing systems from first principles and working on problems without obvious answers, you'll feel at home here.

About the Team

You'll be part of a fast-moving engineering team building the systems that power our customer experience, warehouse operations, and data platform. We value engineers who take ownership, move quickly, and are comfortable figuring things out as they go.

The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll design and build the services that power our core workflows, from order processing to logistics and internal operations.

You'll own meaningful parts of the system end-to-end, making decisions about data models, APIs, and system behavior. You'll work closely with product, frontend, and operations to ensure what we build is reliable, scalable, and actually solves the problem.

What You'll Do

 * Design, build, and maintain backend services that power core business workflows
 * Own projects end-to-end, from early design through production and iteration
 * Design APIs and data models that are clear, stable, and easy to work with
 * Work across systems (orders, inventory, logistics, data) to solve complex, interconnected problems
 * Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, scalability, and maintainability
 * Improve system reliability through monitoring, testing, and debugging
 * Contribute to engineering standards, code reviews, and documentation