Senior Full-Stack Engineer, E-Commerce Platform

About Us:

JetPens is a growing online retailer with over 20 years of history. We specialize in premium writing instruments and office supplies, and have been featured in Wired, New York Times, and CNBC.

At JetPens, software is central to nearly every part of the company, from how customers discover and purchase products to how orders move through inventory and fulfillment. Our custom platform supports millions of customers and a complex physical operation.

Role:

• We are looking for a backend-leaning Senior Full-Stack Engineer to help build and evolve the software behind our e-commerce business.
• You’ll work directly with our principal engineer, help shape technical decisions, and modernize a successful platform through thoughtful, incremental improvements.
• This is an opportunity for unusually broad ownership inside a stable, profitable business, not a narrowly defined role maintaining one small service.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, test, and maintain features across JetPens’ customer-facing e-commerce site and internal business systems.
• Own important work in areas such as checkout, payments, inventory, order processing, fulfillment, and customer communications.
• Understand business problems, evaluate tradeoffs, propose solutions, and carry work through implementation and deployment.
• Investigate difficult problems across application logic, relational data, third-party integrations, and the production environment.
• Improve application performance, reliability, security, observability, and maintainability.
• Modernize the application through carefully scoped changes that preserve stability and business continuity.
• Document systems, operational procedures, and architectural decisions so knowledge remains accessible and useful.

Requirements:

• A track record of independently designing, shipping, and maintaining significant production web features.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in PHP or another server-side language.
• Strong SQL and relational-database skills, including experience investigating performance and data-integrity problems.
• The ability to trace difficult problems across application logic, data, integrations, and the production environment.
• Comfort working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while remaining primarily backend-focused.
• Sound technical judgment, including the ability to explain tradeoffs, identify risks, and choose solutions appropriate to the problem.
• Willingness to understand existing code and business behavior before changing them.
• Clear written communication and disciplined documentation habits.

Bonus Points:

• Professional experience developing PHP applications.
• Experience with e-commerce, payment processing, inventory, ERP, or warehouse systems.
• Experience improving database or application performance.
• Familiarity with application infrastructure, caching, search, observability, or security.
• Experience incrementally modernizing a large, mature application.
• Experience working effectively on a small engineering team.

Technology Environment:

• Our platform is a large, mature web application built primarily with PHP and MySQL.
  • Most interfaces are server-rendered, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript used for customer-facing and internal applications.
• The broader environment includes Linux-based production systems, containerized services, caching and search systems, and integrations with payment providers and other external services.
• You do not need previous experience with every part of this environment. Strong backend engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn an unfamiliar codebase matter more than matching a checklist of tools.
  • Prior PHP experience is helpful but not required, but you must be interested in using PHP as your primary development language.

Hours & Pay:

• Business hours are 9:00 AM PST - 5:30 PM Pacific Time.
• Anticipated starting salary range:
  • San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Seattle:
    • $185K - $220K / year.
  • Other U.S. locations:
    • $155K - $220K / year.
• This role may be local or remote.
  • Remote employees must maintain at least four hours of overlap with Pacific Time business hours.
  • We prefer candidates who can be employed in the United States, but we may consider exceptional international candidates.
• This is an exempt position.

Benefits:

• Benefits for eligible U.S. employees include:
  • Up to 99% company-paid premiums for health, dental & vision insurance.
  • Partial dependent health insurance.
  • Health flexible spending account.
  • Company-paid long-term disability & life insurance.
  • Commuter benefits.
• Benefits for all employees regardless of location include:
  • Paid time off.
  • Paid company holidays.
  • 401(k) retirement plan with 4% company match.

Additional Perks:

• Employee purchase discounts, employee product giveaways, company parties, & free snacks.

How to Apply:

• Please apply via JobScore link:
• Please include a resume with a cover letter. Applications without a cover letter will not be reviewed.
• For candidates who are within 10 years of graduation, please also include a college transcript.

JetPens is an equal opportunity employer and considers all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under California law.

Employment with the company is at-will, meaning either the employee or the company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or notice.