About Howl

Howl is the creator platform for social commerce. We build tools for brands and creators to sell more products across every social platform, together.

In the last 10 years, the $20bn influencer ecommerce market has become a critical part of the retail industry.  Social commerce is a new $1.2 trillion market opportunity (link) and requires new tools, protocols, and technologies.

Howl allows creators and brands to run experiments on what products to talk about and how best to talk about them. Paired with data delivered at the speed of social, creator financing for products, and feedback loops delivered in a beautifully designed platform, Howl takes the guesswork out of selling products on social platforms.

Howl’s mission is to reduce barriers for creators and brands to build social commerce businesses.  We are a remote-first company with a diverse team that reflects our vision. Our beta launched in mid 2022 and powers social commerce for creators and brands across beauty, gaming, home, fashion, and consumer electronics for both industry leaders like Best Buy, Samsung, Target and cult favorites like Cariuma, Kosas, and Youth to the People. We are a Series A company backed by investors including HighlandX and NEA.

For more information, visit www.planethowl.com.

The position

• Develop innovative algorithms for real time, high throughput, low latency marketplace system
• Successful experience designing and building large, scalable and complex distributed systems
• Expertise in the Big Data Technology Stack
• Ability to establish strong relationships with product and business stakeholders across the organization to co create objectives and facilitate their own cross-team scope and effort
• Effective relationship builder throughout the engineering organization to refine initiatives and requirements, guide design and implementation, articulate outcome and impact
• Creates & structures documentation for large code projects concisely & consistently
• Ability to mentor teammates across teams based on experience & expertise
• Relied upon across the engineering organization to keep complex projects on-track and sustainably implemented
• Contribute to refinement and enrichment of development tools and processes
• Ability to write persuasive analysis proposals to help make high-quality decisions about priorities among tech debt and tech strategy. Understands technical debt as a long-term budgeting and risk management tool; Can articulates when to incur more and when to pay it down.

Experience

• A successful candidate will have substantial relevant experience in high-tech software development teams.
• Experience in AdTech or Ecommerce. FinTech is OK too.
• Experience in Big Data. Ideally, strong knowledge of ELT, Reverse ETL, DBT, Snowflake, Spark,
• Experience in Go and/or C++ and/or Python and/or Java programming and AWS

Education expectation

• A bachelor’s or better degree in computer science or software engineering -or-
• A bachelor’s or better degree in a STEM discipline plus substantial software engineering experience

Howl Tech Stack

One of the most frequent questions asked by candidates of Howl engineers is, “What is your tech stack?”  This is a brief overview of our tech stack.

Howl’s systems are implemented as a modern microservices architecture running on Linux servers hosted in AWS.  We use Kubernetes to manage our containers, we use Flask to construct our Web interfaces.  We build interactivity in our web interfaces using Nextjs.  We use Linux, and in particular Debian, Ubuntu, and Alpine distros.

Our favorite programming languages are Python 3, Scala, Go, Elixir, and, of course, TypeScript and JavaScript.  We stash our code in GitHub.

We test each language with an appropriate unit testing tool - JUnit, PyTest, ScalaTest, ExUnit, and Jasmine.  We use Jenkins and Github to run our builds and tests.

Check-ins against the main branch require a code review by another SWE.

We keep some data in Snowflake, some in Postgres, others in DynamoDB, and some, of course, in MySQL.  We build our product graph using Elasticache.  We are working to reduce the number of databases we rely on.

We stream data around using Kafka, Spark, and Storm.  Maybe we will prune this list sometime.

We are not hostile to commercial software - we use AirTable, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Looker, Matomo, and many more.

Important Notice: Howl is a fully remote organization!

Howl is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or veteran status.