About ShipEngine

At ShipEngine — and our sister company, ShipStation — we liberate entrepreneurs of all scales from inefficiencies and complexities in logistics, so they can focus more on what they love: designing their store experiences, building businesses, and engaging with their customers. We solve mind-boggling problems at scale but our passion is really for entrepreneurs and their customers. This has made us the market leader in the eCommerce shipping and logistics space with hundreds of millions of orders and shipments every month.

About This Position

Our Developer Experience team advocates for the developers who use our APIs and ensures that the products we build are well-designed, easy to use, and solve their needs.

We’re looking for an API architecture lead who has spent years using APIs to solve real business problems. Someone who is highly skilled at API design and domain modeling, is adept at writing clear, approachable documentation, and can build tooling and libraries in a variety of programming languages for our customers to leverage.

This is a cross-functional role requiring you to collaborate with product, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer-success teams to ensure that users have a frictionless end-to-end experience with ShipEngine. You will help shape the future of our API products and developer experience.

At ShipEngine, you will...

• Become an expert on our current APIs and design patterns
• Provide technical and strategic insight on API products, features, designs, and standards
• Lead the design of new APIs in collaboration with stakeholders and subject matter experts
• Establish code, design, and writing standards
• Determine the technologies and processes that the DX team uses
• Create automated tests to ensure that APIs comply with designs, schemas, and style guides
• Create technical content (sample code, demos, reference implementations) to demonstrate usage and best practices
• Write and maintain client libraries and SDKs in multiple programming languages
• Write API documentation, tutorials, and demos
• Work cross-functionally with other departments that interact with developer customers
• Be in a highly visible thought leadership role, presenting insightful content to both internal and external audiences
• Help organize and run community events, meetups, hackathons, and conferences
• Lead by example and foster a culture of quality in our DX and engineering teams

We’re looking for someone who...

• Has a strong desire to influence the product direction and be responsible for the developer experience
• Is a technical expert who can make well-informed design decisions and evangelize best practices within the company
• Navigates trade-offs effectively
• Has the experience necessary to proactively anticipate problems and offer solutions
• Is proficient in writing code in a few different programming languages, and enjoys learning new languages
• Empathizes with users of all experience levels
• Enjoys teaching and enabling other developers to be successful
• Is a skilled writer who can explain complex topics simply and clearly
• Is comfortable speaking and presenting to internal and external audiences
• Has their finger on the pulse of current development trends in multiple ecosystems
• Excels at generating excitement and positivity about our product and features
• Thrives in a cross-functional, collaborative environment
• Can work with a high degree of autonomy and limited supervision
• Holds themselves to a high standard of quality and has meticulous attention to detail

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing, building, and using APIs
• Proficient in domain modeling and domain driven design
• Deep understanding of REST principles and the best practices in the field
• Familiar with multiple REST specifications and the differences between them
  (e.g. JSON:API, HAL, OData)
• Familiar with multiple API protocols and their strengths/weaknesses
  (e.g. SOAP, REST, Atom, GraphQL, gRPC, Socket.io)
• Understands different API styles and when to use them
  (e.g. RPC, CRUD, query, pub/sub, real-time)
• Experience with API testing tools, including contract testing, specification testing, and compliance testing
• Able to write idiomatic and approachable code in a few different programming languages (especially PHP, C#, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Casual environment and flexible work schedule
• 100% paid medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Vanguard 401k with matching
• Flexible vacation and paid holidays
• Stocked kitchen, beer Fridays, weekly catered lunches (+ healthy options!)
• Sit/stand desk, and top-of-the-line workstation of your choosing
• Work with the latest technologies
• Contribute to open source
• Speak at conferences and meetups