Software Development Lead — Marketplace

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Software Development Lead — Marketplace

Location: Seattle, WA (on-site)
Type: Full-Time
Compensation: Competitive Salary + Meaningful Equity + Performance Bonuses

Buy Wander is rebuilding the $850B retail returns industry — and turning it into something people actually love.

We take chaotic truckloads of returned goods and transform them into a fast, fun, treasure-hunt shopping experience powered by AI, real-time auctions, and in-store pickup.

We're not just building a marketplace. We're building a daily habit
. And the marketplace — the auctions, the app, the search, the moment a customer discovers something they didn't know they wanted — is where that habit is won or lost.

That's what you'd own.

We're hiring a Software Development Lead — the most senior hands-on engineer on our customer-facing product.

This is an IC+ role. You'll write code, set technical direction, and own the systems that power the buyer experience end to end:
auctions, website/app, notifications, search, and personalization. You'll be the person who makes the marketplace fast, reliable, and addictive — and who raises the technical bar for everyone building alongside you.

You won't inherit a finished product. You'll shape it. We have a foundation and momentum; we need a builder who can take the marketplace to the next level.

We're looking for someone who is:

• A hands-on builder first — you ship, and your code sets the standard
• Product-minded — you care why a feature exists, not just how to build it
• Obsessed with the customer experience — speed, polish, and delight matter to you
• AI-forward — you use modern tools to move faster and build smarter

Real-Time Auctions

• Own the auction engine that powers live bidding — real-time, accurate, and rock-solid under load
• Handle the hard problems: concurrency, bid integrity, race conditions, and the spikes that come with a live marketplace
• Partner with Data on auction design, demand signals, and pricing

Website & App

• Lead development of the buyer-facing web and mobile experience (Vue/Nuxt front end, Python/C# services)
• Make it fast, intuitive, and fun — the treasure hunt should feel like a treasure hunt
• Own performance, reliability, and the release process for the product customers touch every day

Search & Discovery

• Build search that helps people find — and stumble onto — items they'll love, across a constantly changing, one-of-a-kind inventory
• Tune relevance, ranking, and browse for a catalog where no two items are alike
• Partner with Data to surface the right items to the right customer at the right moment

Notifications & Engagement

• Own the notification systems (push, email, in-app) that bring customers back — outbid alerts, auction endings, new drops
• Build engagement loops that drive the daily habit without becoming noise

Technical Leadership (hands-on)

• Set the technical direction, architecture, and quality bar for marketplace engineering
• Mentor other engineers through code review, design, and example
• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy-vs-integrate calls and own the outcomes
• Partner closely with Product, Data, and Warehouse/Ops engineering to keep the full experience aligned

Requirements

• 6+ years building and shipping consumer-facing web/mobile products at scale
• Deep hands-on strength across the stack — comfortable owning both front end and backend services
• Experience with real-time systems — live auctions, bidding, feeds, or similar high-concurrency products
• Experience with marketplaces, auctions, or high-concurrency consumer apps
• Search / relevance or recommendation / personalization systems experience
• Notification and engagement / lifecycle systems at scale
• A track record of leading technically as the senior…