Staff Software Engineer I, Recommendations Platform

Key Skills

Data Analytics, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), JavaScript, Machine learning techniques, PHP Programming, Product Management, Python Programming, Scala Programming, Streaming APIs

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer to help us enable product teams to personalize the buyer and seller experience across Etsy with the help of machine learning. Our team delivers APIs and tools that help buyers find what they are looking for and form a connection with our sellers. You will be primarily responsible for the Recommendations API gateway, our middleware that sits between the frontend and the ML orchestration services. This is a great opportunity for engineers interested in developer platforms and getting exposed to machine learning systems

This is a full-time position reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy. For this role, we are considering candidates based in Mexico who are either remote, flex, or office-based. Etsy offers different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team. Learn more about our flexible work options and workplace safety policies here.

What’s this team like at Etsy?

The Recommendations Platform team builds an Internal Developer Platform that aims to accelerate the adoption of machine learning capabilities that enhance personalization and optimize recommendation relevance. To do so, we partner with product teams to help them adopt our API solutions and with applied scientists to productionize their ML models.

Here’s a taste of the problems we’re solving:

• How can we help someone find that perfect item, even when they don’t know what they’re looking for?
• How can we understand buyers’ motives and interests to personalize their experience?
• How can we help buyers to explore the breadth of Etsy's inventory?
• How can we accelerate the experimentation cycle for product teams?
• How can we lower the engineering burden of product teams that adopt our sophisticated ML solutions?

Our production systems rely on PHP, Scala, Python, JavaScript, and GCP; we are proud to have an engineering culture that encourages career growth and learning. You can learn more about our philosophies and some of the earlier challenges we’ve been solving at Building a Platform for Serving Recommendations on our Engineering blog, Code as Craft.

What does the day-to-day look like?

• Build sophisticated solutions to deliver optimal content to tens of millions of users for their personalized shopping missions.
• Prototype, optimize, and productionize large-scale product improvements that deliver key results.
• Contribute at all levels of Etsy’s Recommendations stack, ranging from application interfaces to the serving layer.
• Work cross-functionally with various engineering teams (e.g. product engineering, machine learning infrastructure, data analysts), participating in design, prioritization, and implementation.
• Provide detailed and constructive design and code reviews.
• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.

Qualifications

Qualities that will help you thrive in this role are:

•  Have solid software engineering and coding skills, including CS fundamentals like data structures and algorithms.
• Have extensive professional experience with objective-oriented programming languages like Scala, Java, Python, etc.
• Have some familiarity with or are excited to learn about PHP and functional programming in Scala.
• Have experience building large-scale, low-latency distributed systems. 
• Are comfortable collaborating with Machine Learning Scientists, Product Managers, Data Analysts, and Designers to ensure that you deliver impactful product features.
• Are an analytical thinker and understand how to wield data to make informed decisions about your work.
• Turn ideas into deeply reliable and well-tested code with an eye towards maintainability.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Being an advocate for end-users. 
• Experience building production recommendations, search, advertising, or general e-commerce systems.
• A trust in and commitment to Etsy’s vision, mission, and values.
• Exhibiting empathy, communication, and technical skill are valued equally.

Additional Information

What's Next

If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please share your resume with us and feel free to include a cover letter if you'd like. As we hope you've seen already, Etsy is a place that values individuality and variety. We don't want you to be like everyone else -- we want you to be like you! So tell us what you're all about.