About Howl 

Howl is a creator platform for the customer centric and product obsessed. Creators of every size use Howl’s commerce and payments technology to get better rates and easy payments for their big ideas. Creators on Howl earn more when they open doors for others, and have the tools to turn their craft into a business.

We are a remote-first company with a diverse team that reflects our vision. Howl builds so millions more creators can bring their talent, magic, and service to shoppers around the world.

What You Will Do

• Provide technical and design leadership within an engineering team.
• Master the code base, toolchain, and development processes of a product team.
• Work with product management partners to articulate requirements and agree on designs for components.
• Negotiate interfaces between your components and others in the Howl system.
• Design software components and subsystems for Howl's products or infrastructure.
• Implement high-quality software components and subsystems with your team.
• Document the architecture of your designs at the block diagram level.
• Write technical documents as needed to memorialize design and implementation decisions and rationales.
• May serve as tech lead (player-coach) of an implementation team.
• Drive implementation of automated testing for your components.
• Contribute to refinement and enrichment of development tools and processes.
• Participate in risk analysis and risk management exercises with engineering leadership.

What You Bring to the Role

• A successful candidate will have substantial relevant experience in high-tech software development teams.
• 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 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.

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 Neptune and Gremlin.  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 StoryBook.