Lead Engineer Commerce Core Python Backend

## About the Role Fulfil is a technical founder-led, bootstrapped company in our 11th year of operations. We're a small team of exceptional engineers powering millions of orders for brands like HexClad, Ridge Wallet, and Caraway. You won't be a tech lead buried in meetings — you'll be hands-on, driving technical direction while still shipping code. At a large company, leads spend their days in alignment meetings and writing strategy docs. Here, you'll design systems, mentor engineers, and see your decisions impact merchants processing millions of dollars daily. ## The Team Commerce Core owns order management, inventory, fulfillment, purchasing, and warehouse management. The north star: orders flow without human intervention. ## A Typical Week - Monday: Define the technical roadmap for Q2 with the Product Lead. Two major merchants are scaling 5x — prioritize the infrastructure work. - Tuesday: Deep dive on order allocation performance. Current p99 is 2s; design a path to 200ms. - Wednesday: Mentor a Senior Engineer on their first major architecture project. Review their design, push back on complexity. - Thursday: Ship a critical fix yourself. Some weeks you're 80% code, some weeks 20%. - Friday: Interview a Staff Engineer candidate. Debrief with the team. Make the call. ## What You'll Own - Technical roadmap for Commerce Core - Architecture decisions that affect millions of orders - Performance and reliability of core systems - Growing Senior Engineers into Leads - Cross-team technical coordination ## What We're Looking For - 6-9 years building backend systems at scale - Track record of technical leadership (formal or informal) - You've designed systems that others now maintain - Deep expertise in Python and PostgreSQL - Strong opinions, loosely held - You make teams around you better ## Tech Stack - Python - PostgreSQL - Redis - Celery - RabbitMQ - SQLAlchemy - Kubernetes - pytest - Claude Code ## Hiring Process - Initial interview — Technical leadership experience - Live coding — Yes, leads still code here - Interview loop — Architecture, mentorship, bar raiser - Bootcamp — Leads also start in Product Support to learn how merchants use Fulfil