Senior Software Engineer, Back-End; Remote Canada

About the Role

What happens when your business model breaks the assumptions most e-commerce platforms were built on? You build your own. At Short Story, we're rethinking how online shopping works: from inventory and logistics to personalization and fit. If you're excited by designing systems from first principles and working on problems without obvious answers, you'll feel at home here.

• Design, build, and maintain backend services that power core business workflows.
• Own projects end-to-end, from early design through production and iteration.
• Design APIs and data models that are clear, stable, and easy to work with.
• Work across systems (orders, inventory, logistics, data) to solve complex, interconnected problems.
• Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, scalability, and maintainability.
• Improve system reliability through monitoring, testing, and debugging.
• Contribute to engineering standards, code reviews, and documentation.

• 5 years of software development experience, 2 years of Python experience.
• 5 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• Familiar with infrastructure, monitoring, and CI/CD practices.
• Familiar with the following technologies.
• Focus on communication and documentation.
• Experience designing stable, scalable, and well-documented APIs.

• Test-driven development (TDD) experience.
• Tech Lead for an engineering team of 3 people.
• Proven track record running large-scale distributed systems.
• Worked in sprint-based environments.

• Generous Paid Time Off.
• Comprehensive health, vision, and dental care.
• 401k with company match (US).
• Either in-person in San Francisco, or remote in US or Canada.
• Employee discount on merchandise.
• Opportunity to work at a Y-Combinator backed startup with a dedicated and experienced founding team.

Short Story is committed to providing equal employment opportunity and a work environment free of discrimination and harassment for all employees and applicants.