About Shippo

At Shippo, our vision is bold and clear: we are the shipping layer of the internet. Our mission is to make every merchant successful through excellent shipping, delivering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure. We’re building the backbone of global e-commerce — connecting merchants to carriers worldwide through a single API and intuitive dashboard.

As a remote-first and globally distributed team, we believe flexibility fuels trust, autonomy, and performance. Our diverse perspectives — across continents, cultures, and time zones — drive our innovation and enable us to build solutions used by businesses everywhere. We invest in modern, scalable technology so our teams can build, ship, and iterate with confidence.

Your impact starts here: every person at Shippo plays a direct role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and makes shipping simpler for businesses around the world.

How we will deliver success together:

Shippo is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead our Platform Enablement organization, which encompasses Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Engineering Enablement (Developer Experience), and Security teams. This is a highly visible, strategic role that will shape how hundreds of engineers build, deploy, and operate software at Shippo. You will own the technical strategy and architecture for our platform capabilities, driving consistency across our infrastructure while accelerating product team velocity. As a Principal Engineer, you'll balance deep technical work (prototyping, building critical tooling) with broad organizational influence (architecture decisions, mentoring senior engineers, establishing standards). You'll navigate complex trade-offs between cloud cost optimization, security hardening, and developer velocity. This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is a key role in driving engineering culture and technical direction across the organization.

Shipping & handling responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for Shippo's platform capabilities across cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and security
• Establish architectural guardrails and governance frameworks that enable teams to move fast while maintaining security and reliability
• Design high-level systems that solve significantly complex problems involving cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and security tooling
• Partner with Staff Engineers across Engineering to ensure clear ownership, system boundaries, and operational health
• Establish company-wide engineering standards for infrastructure, deployment practices, and security by default
• Create organizational mechanisms (templates, service catalogs, automated guardrails) that ensure teams maintain excellence without requiring direct oversight
• Drive stronger application standards through self-service tooling and golden paths; reduce platform fragmentation and prevent siloed solutions
• Identify and eliminate systemic organizational barriers that slow engineering velocity or create toil
• Design and deliver solutions that maximize impact across the organization - from cost optimization to security automation to developer productivity
• Conduct early investigation, prototyping, and experimentation to validate approaches before scaling across teams
• Mentor and influence the career growth of Senior and Staff Engineers across platform teams
• Navigate complex trade-offs (cost vs. security vs. velocity) with company-wide implications and drive adoption of difficult decisions
• Partner with Security team to drive automation and secure-by-default practices into engineering workflows
• Drive ownership and cost transparency for platform services that product teams consume
• Maintain tight feedback loops with product teams to ensure platform capabilities directly address pain points
• Lead proactive reviews of operational and system health across platform services
• Produce long-lasting artifacts (talks, documentation, frameworks) that serve as force multipliers for the organization
• Typically split time between shipping code, prototyping, libraries, and tooling (30%) and driving designs and standards in reviews (70%)

Your shipping requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in platform engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure
• Strong hands-on software development skills with the ability to write production-quality code, build prototypes, and develop internal tooling and libraries
• Proven track record leading multi-year, org-wide technical initiatives at high-growth technology companies
• Hands-on experience with cloud cost optimization, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and/or container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, or improving engineering productivity at scale
• Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy that aligns with business objectives and anticipate industry changes
• Track record of building consensus across engineering leadership on complex architectural decisions
• Experience establishing engineering standards and/or governance frameworks that scale
• Proven ability to mentor senior technical talent and influence career growth
• Excellent judgment in navigating trade-offs between competing priorities (cost, security, velocity, technical debt)
• Strong communication skills - able to translate complex technical concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfortable with ambiguity - able to investigate, analyze, and prototype solutions before committing to broad rollouts
• Strong analytical and data-driven decision making skills
• Proven ability to build trust and collaborate effectively with product teams, security teams, and engineering leadership
• Track record of driving engineering culture improvements and best practices adoption
• Experience participating in hiring processes with a strong bar for technical excellence
• BS or MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Bonus

• Experience at companies with SaaS, e-commerce, or logistics platforms
• Background in both application development and platform/infrastructure engineering
• Strong cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with demonstrated ability to balance cost, security, and developer experience
• Working knowledge of security practices, compliance requirements, and secure-by-default architecture patterns
• Contributions to open source projects or engineering community (talks, blog posts, frameworks)
• Experience with usage-based infrastructure or multi-tenant platform architectures
• Prior experience in startup or high-growth environments
• Experience with service meshes (e.g. Istio)
• Familiarity with configuration and maintenance of common infrastructure components such as Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, and Hadoop
• Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, SumoLogic, etc.)
• 3+ years of experience in software development

What is in the Shippo Package?

• Healthcare coverage for medical, dental, and vision (90% covered by the company, incl. dependents). Pets coverage is also available!
• Take-as-much-as-you-need vacation policy & flexible working hours
• One week-long company wide winter slow down 
• 3 Volunteer Days Off (VTOs)
• WFH stipend to set up your home office
• Charity donation match up to $100
• Dedicated programs, coaching, tools, and resources for your professional and career growth as well as an individual learning stipend for your personal and focused growth
• Fun team in person time through our Shippos Everywhere program which includes regular team and company off-sites throughout the year as well as local Shippos gatherings

Compensation

Our Compensation Shippolicy:

We believe compensation is a custom experience and are commited to fair and equitable compensation practices. The standard base pay range for this role is min is $212k to a max $287k annual salary (we tend to anchor our offers at the mid point $250k). Since we are focused on hiring Shippos Everywhere, we have 2 US pay ranges, a standard compensation range for the majority of the US and a standard +1 compensation range for those who live in areas where the cost of labor is higher, such as NYC and California.

The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: financial budgets, work experience, training, transferable skills, business needs, and market value. The base pay salary ranges are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Total compensation for this role will include, equity, medical, dental, vision and other benefits noted in our Shippos “package” section.

Sail through the process:

Here at Shippo, we celebrate inclusivity and are committed to creating equal access to opportunities for people from all backgrounds, perspectives and geographies. These values define who we are and everything we do. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance, or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please contact us at accommodations@goshippo.com

Shippos in the wild:

Our people, much like the packages we help ship, are all over the world. This means, through our remote-first program, “Shippos Everywhere”, our roles can be based anywhere in the US with the exception of Delaware, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia and many roles can be based internationally.

For locations outside of the US and Ireland, the employment contracts are powered by Remote.com (all Shippo perks still apply - including equity!). What we want to emphasize is that you can be successful at Shippo regardless of location.