Description:

Short Story is an award-winning, technology-powered retailer dedicated to petite women 5'4" and under.
The company aims to create a seamless shopping experience for millions of petite women, allowing them to dress with effortless confidence.
As a fast-growing startup, Short Story utilizes a data-driven learning system that leverages customer feedback to create exceptional, tailored products.
The role of Staff Backend Engineer involves shaping the backbone of Short Story’s tech ecosystem as one of the first five engineers.
The engineer will report to the Head of Engineering and work across internal and customer-facing platforms, focusing on order processing, warehouse operations, and customer personalization.
Responsibilities include designing, building, and maintaining scalable backend services in Python, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and owning core infrastructure components across AWS, Postgres, and Kubernetes.
The engineer will also deploy and monitor services using CI/CD best practices, contribute to system architecture, and help establish engineering guidelines and backend best practices.

Requirements:

Candidates must have back-end development experience and have built and scaled complex systems end-to-end.
Fluency in Python and experience shipping production systems using frameworks like Flask, Falcon, or FastAPI is required.
Strong experience with containerized services in Kubernetes and confidence in deploying to cloud platforms like AWS is necessary.
Candidates should have experience with relational databases like Postgres and be able to write efficient, scalable SQL.
Experience leading backend architecture decisions and identifying when to optimize, refactor, or replatform is essential.
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability tools to maintain system health is required.
Candidates must have built and maintained robust test suites using Pytest or similar frameworks and care about reliability.
Designing clean, consistent, and long-lasting APIs is a must.
Knowledge of queue-based or event-driven architectures and the ability to design systems for scale is required.
Strong documentation, communication, and mentoring skills are necessary.
Candidates should thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and enjoy owning complex problems from idea to execution.

Employees receive 4 weeks of vacation (20 days).
Medical and dental benefits are provided.
The position allows for fully remote work with optional office access in San Francisco and Toronto.
Employees will have ownership and autonomy in a fast-growing, mission-driven company.