Principal Software Engineer, Data Products

About Shippo

At Shippo, our vision is bold and clear: we are the shipping layer of the internet. Our mission is to make every merchant successful through excellent shipping, delivering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure. We’re building the backbone of global e-commerce — connecting merchants to carriers worldwide through a single API and intuitive dashboard.

As a remote-first and globally distributed team, we believe flexibility fuels trust, autonomy, and performance. Our diverse perspectives — across continents, cultures, and time zones — drive our innovation and enable us to build solutions used by businesses everywhere. We invest in modern, scalable technology so our teams can build, ship, and iterate with confidence.

Your impact starts here: every person at Shippo plays a direct role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and makes shipping simpler for businesses around the world.

How we will deliver success together:

Level the playing field: enterprise-grade logistics for small merchants

Large enterprises have spent years building the shipping intelligence that makes their logistics work: accurate delivery estimates, automated business rules, and supply chain decisions backed by real data. Small merchants have not had access to any of it.

Our data organization is closing that gap. We build the delivery estimates, business rules automation, and logistics insights that give a small merchant the same capabilities an enterprise logistics team takes for granted. We turn insight into action and simplify the complexity of running an ecommerce logistics operation.

That only works if the systems behind it are built well and run smoothly. We are looking for a principal engineer to set the standard for how we design, review, build, and operate those systems. You will work alongside our software engineers, data scientists, and data engineers to turn analytical and prototype work into the data-intensive systems, integrated with AI and ML, that our customers depend on for logistics decisions at scale.

Shipping & handling responsibilities

Engineering rigor

• Set the bar in design review and code review by demonstrating it.
• Raise the standard for testing, observability, and operational readiness across the Data org.
• Turn repeated solutions into reusable primitives. Document them so the next team does not need you.
• Grow the next set of technical leaders. Pair, mentor, and hand off ownership.

Architecture across engineering, data science, and data platform

• Design and build the interfaces where Shippo's application services meet our ML and data systems. Write the reference implementation, not only the design doc.
• Author technical RFCs to guide data, API, and application architecture. Run the reviews that make those decisions hold.
• Set the performance, security and reliability standards for how application services call data and ML systems.

Data to production

• Ensure analytical and data engineering work turn into systems that meet our bar for security, quality, maintainability, and performance.
• Pragmatic approach working directly with data scientists and data engineers to find the friction in their workflow, then remove it.
• Ensure our data products deliver customer and business impact. Balance speed to market against architecture, and say which one wins and why.

AI and ML

• Advise on the development workflow from experimentation to production: train, track, register, validate, deploy, monitor, retrain.
• Experience building agentic workflows. Prove them in production against real traffic with real evaluation. Harden the ones that deliver value and kill the ones that do not.

Your shipping requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering, with deep ownership of large-scale production systems. You have set the engineering standard on a team, not just met it.
• Track record as a principal-level individual contributor. You set technical direction across teams, wrote the RFCs, ran the design reviews, and delivered multi-quarter roadmaps without direct authority.
• Depth in distributed, data-intensive production systems. You have made design decisions driven by latency, throughput, availability, and cost, and you have experience operating them in production.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise: experience building and deploying containerized production services, with the ability to navigate autoscaling, resource constraints, and resilience patterns to define deployment standards for ML workloads.
• Strong working experience alongside data scientists and data engineers. You have taken analytical or prototype work and made it production grade.
• Proven adoption and mentorship. Teams chose the standards and tooling you built because they were better, not because someone mandated them, and engineers got better from working with you.

Bonus

• Solid understanding of what a good ML development workflow looks like, enough to advise a team building one.
• Experience building agentic AI solutions for customers, including evaluation harnesses, guardrails, and observability.
• Hands-on Databricks, specifically with ML tooling.
• Feature store patterns and online-offline consistency.

What is in the Shippo Package?

• Healthcare coverage for medical, dental, and vision (90% covered by the company, incl. dependents). Pets coverage is also available!
• Take-as-much-as-you-need vacation policy & flexible working hours
• One week-long company wide winter slow down 
• 3 Volunteer Days Off (VTOs)
• WFH stipend to set up your home office
• Charity donation match up to $100
• Dedicated programs, coaching, tools, and resources for your professional and career growth as well as an individual learning stipend for your personal and focused growth
• Fun team in person time through our Shippos Everywhere program which includes regular team and company off-sites throughout the year as well as local Shippos gatherings

Compensation

Our Compensation Shippolicy:

We believe compensation is a custom experience and are commited to fair and equitable compensation practices. The standard base pay range for this role is min is $212k to a max $287k annual salary (we tend to anchor our offers at the mid point $250k). Since we are focused on hiring Shippos Everywhere, we have 2 US pay ranges, a standard compensation range for the majority of the US and a standard +1 compensation range for those who live in areas where the cost of labor is higher, such as NYC and California.

The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: financial budgets, work experience, training, transferable skills, business needs, and market value. The base pay salary ranges are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Total compensation for this role will include, equity, medical, dental, vision and other benefits noted in our Shippos “package” section.

Sail through the process:

Here at Shippo, we celebrate inclusivity and are committed to creating equal access to opportunities for people from all backgrounds, perspectives and geographies. These values define who we are and everything we do. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance, or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please contact us at [email protected]

Shippos in the wild:

Our people, much like the packages we help ship, are all over the world. This means, through our remote-first program, “Shippos Everywhere”, our roles can be based anywhere in the US with the exception of Delaware, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia and many roles can be based internationally.

For locations outside of the US and Ireland, the employment contracts are powered by Remote.com (all Shippo perks still apply - including equity!). What we want to emphasize is that you can be successful at Shippo regardless of location.