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.

What You’ll Do

You will be a software engineer on the Data Engineering team. You will work with stakeholders like engineers from other teams, product managers, and solution engineers to design, create, and improve data pipelines that are responsible for ingesting, transforming, and exporting data to/from both internal and external systems. In addition to internal customers like sales, product, machine learning, and other application teams, we also send data to external customers. You will build and maintain APIs for data access and validation used by other teams. You will work to improve data quality, improve trust in our data, and help our organization become more data driven.

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of software development
• 3+ years of experience designing, building and maintaining enterprise data pipelines and/or warehouses
• Demonstrable knowledge of big data databases (e.g. Snowflake or BigTable) as well as SQL 
• Experience with message processing (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Experience working closely with the product team to help prioritize the best solutions to the largest problems.
• Reliable organization and communication skills and follow through on verbal and written commitments.
• Persistent approach to problem-solving and ability to see solutions through to completion even in the face of complexities or unknowns. A proactive mindset that drives you to pursue solutions rather than waiting for the answers to come to you.
• Attention to detail in work and ability to identify ambiguities in specifications.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, especially when communicating trade-offs between technical decisions to non-technical colleagues.
• Flexibility to work and maintain focus in an evolving environment. 
• A collaborative personality and a commitment to helping others.

Howl's Technology and Data Stack

Our data is centralized into a Snowflake database. We replicate data, mainly using Fivetran, from our transaction databases, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Neptune (graph database). Our events are also streamed into Snowflake after processing through a Storm cluster that uses DynamDB for persistence. We use DBT to build our ELT DAGs and publish dashboards on Looker. We use libraries like Marshmallow and Great Expectations for data validation.

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 React. 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 to run our builds and tests.

We also use Airflow, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, and StoryBook.

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.