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.  It has evolved into social commerce, a new $1.2 trillion market opportunity (link) requiring new tools, protocols, and technologies.  

Howl enables 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.

About the Role

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.

• Build test automation frameworks that can be embedded into continuous integration and development process,
• Work with the SRE team to set up infrastructure for load testing and regression testing system,
• Work with senior engineers and tech leads in designing and implementing test plans and automation - read the code base and collaborate as a peer with the development team,
• Build tools and automation to help software engineers and test engineers test, monitor, and create test environments,
• Craft comprehensive test plans, and define the test and quality guild of practice,
• Support high software quality, reliability, maintainability, stability, and security within a microservices oriented system,
• Understand risk management and cost/benefit analysis for the testing process - how to prioritize the most effective tests,
• Knowledge of project management practices and the ability to document processes and procedures.

• A successful candidate will have substantial relevant experience in high-tech software development teams
• 5+ years of software engineering experience
• 3+ years of experience as a Software Engineer in Test
• Ability to diagnose and debug complex distributed systems
• Working knowledge of industry standards test automation tools
• Experience in coordinating multiple work streams across multiple teams
• Experience with cloud providers and their services
• Understanding of Linux internals, Docker, Kubernetes, networking, storage, and observability standards 
• Dedication to continuing professional development
• Strong communication and organizational skills, motivation to achieve results in a dynamic, fast-paced environment
• A bachelor’s or better degree in a STEM discipline or 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. 
• Our favorite programming languages are Python 3, Go, Elixir, and, on the frontend, TypeScript and JavaScript. We stash our code in GitHub.
• We test each language with an appropriate unit testing tool - PyTest, Cypress, 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 and Elasticsearch and some, of course, in MySQL. We build our product graph using Neptune. We are working to reduce the number of databases we rely on.
• We stream data around using Kafka, and Storm. Maybe we will prune/update this list sometime.
• We are not hostile to commercial software - we use DBT, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Looker, Notion.

The base salary range for this role is $170,000/yr - $200,000/yr USD.

At Howl, we offer a competitive compensation package inclusive of base salary, incentive pay and stock options. Incentive awards are allocated based on individual performance. Certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role. 

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.