Associate Engineer - Core Services

📋 Description

• • Join Shipt’s Core Services team as an Associate Engineer and help power the technology that delivers millions of orders to doorsteps across 5,000+ U.S. cities. In this entry-level role you’ll build, test, and refine the foundational services that keep our marketplace humming—from real-time inventory and pricing engines to order-routing and payment processing. Every line of code you write directly affects the speed, reliability, and delight our customers experience when they tap “Place Order.”
• • You will own small-to-medium features end-to-end: design, implementation, automated tests, deployment, and post-release monitoring. Expect to start with well-scoped tickets that grow into larger projects as you demonstrate impact. Senior engineers will mentor you through rigorous code reviews and pair-programming sessions, ensuring you master clean architecture, test-driven development, and continuous-delivery best practices.
• • Collaborate daily with product managers, UX designers, data scientists, and operations to translate user stories into resilient micro-services. You’ll participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and retros—your voice matters in shaping what we build next. Clear, proactive communication is essential: ask clarifying questions early, surface risks quickly, and document decisions so the next engineer can ramp up in minutes, not days.
• • Write high-quality code primarily in modern JVM languages (Java/Kotlin) and occasionally in Python or Go when the problem space demands it. You’ll leverage Spring Boot, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform to ship containerized services to AWS. Expect to instrument your code with metrics, traces, and structured logs so that production issues are detected and resolved before customers notice.
• • Contribute to our evolving testing pyramid: unit tests with JUnit/TestNG, contract tests with Pact, and end-to-end suites in Cypress or Playwright. You’ll help maintain >80 % coverage and keep build times under five minutes so feedback loops stay tight. When tests fail, you’ll dive into logs, reproduce locally, and push fixes the same day.
• • Troubleshoot production incidents during business hours and occasional on-call rotations (currently one week every 8–10 weeks). You’ll join a blameless culture that treats outages as learning opportunities; post-mortems focus on systemic fixes, not finger-pointing. Over time you’ll become the go-to person for at least one critical service.
• • Maintain crisp technical documentation in our internal wiki and OpenAPI specs. You’ll update sequence diagrams, runbooks, and ADRs so tribal knowledge never walks out the door. When APIs change, you’ll version them responsibly and communicate breaking changes across teams.
• • Stay curious. The Core Services roadmap includes migrating legacy monoliths to event-driven architectures, adopting GraphQL for internal tooling, and experimenting with Rust for ultra-low-latency components. You’ll have dedicated “investment time” every Friday to explore new tech, spike prototypes, and present findings to the guild.
• • Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion in every aspect of your work—from inclusive code reviews to equitable on-call rotations. Shipt’s culture thrives when every teammate feels safe to contribute their authentic self.
• • Work in a flexible hybrid model from our Birmingham HQ (Shipt Tower), with optional days from home and quarterly off-sites in San Francisco or Minneapolis for cross-team summits. We provide top-tier equipment (M-series MacBook Pro, curved 4K monitors, noise-canceling headphones) and a $1,500 annual learning stipend so you can level up at conferences, courses, or certifications.