Backend Product Engineer

⛵️ About Wholesail Wholesail is an early stage startup that builds software to connect wholesalers and their buyers by automating and digitizing invoicing and payment in the $5 trillion wholesale trade industry. The company’s first product is an electronic invoicing and payment portal for wholesale sellers, which allows them to get paid faster and decrease losses. For buyers, Wholesail automates the accounts payable expense management process to save them time and money.

Wholesail’s initial industry focus is to build a network effect driven payment business in the highly fragmented $1 trillion US food distribution market, in which invoicing and payment is nearly entirely paper-driven today . Wholesail was founded by a team of engineers, product managers, and designers whose prior startups were acquired by OpenTable, and the company is well funded with backing from a half dozen VCs and 20+ angel investors including early executives and team members from Stripe, Square, Dropbox, Yelp, OpenTable and Everlane. Are you fascinated by how people use products, actively seek to understand the “why” behind product decisions, and approach product building as a craft?

Are you passionate about working with other experienced engineers who have a passion for their craft? We'd love to have you join our voyage as a founding member of our product engineering team.

About The Role

As an early engineer, you’ll build new features and internal APIs to create value for the suppliers and buyers on our network. Your work will skew towards backend development, but you'll end up working up and down the stack and you’ll spend a lot of time with our sales and support team and our customers to figure out the details of the products you craft. Our small product team wears many hats, so you'll get significant exposure to many areas adjacent to engineering: design, marketing, customer success, sales, and all of the functions of an early stage startup.

As a product oriented member of our engineering team, you’ll couple strong technical execution with an active voice in shaping the product through contribution in product conversations and identifying product/technical tradeoffs. You’ll participate in different styles of execution based on the stage of product development – from iterating quickly on an experiment with intentionally scrappy code to building sustainable systems that serve as a foundation for years to come. Most significantly, you'll be building the company with us.

We are early on our voyage and there are vast uncharted seas ahead. We want to work with fellow Wholesailers who care deeply about the process of building an enduring company: from what values we embrace, how we build our teams, decisions about how we grow our business, and everything in between. " by digging into the nuts-and-bolts of how things work as a first principles thinker.

Think deeply about products – from building empathy for users, to understanding how a product works, how it fits into a complex system, and how it creates business value. Obsess about the details of your craft whether it’s designing a new abstraction layer, building an API for a colleague on the frontend team or shipping a pixel perfect feature. Quickly build intuition in new domains and are able to articulate product/engineering tradeoffs early on while also pragmatically handling (and minimizing work on) edge cases.

Estimate and prioritize when faced with different proposed solutions, to help guide the team towards building the most impactful products. Strive to quickly deliver value through rapid product validation cycles and have a keen ability to identify quick wins that create value for customers. Use data to guide your understanding of user behavior and inform the decisions you make to maximize building value for customers.