Job Description
Job DescriptionDescription:Build the Product Millions Will Fall in Love With
Location: Seattle, WA (on-site)
Type: Full-Time
Compensation: Competitive Salary + Meaningful Equity + Performance Bonuses
ABOUT BUYWANDER
BuyWander 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.
THE ROLE
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
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
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
Personalization
- Turn browse ? bid ? win ? pickup behavior into a personalized experience
- 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:WHAT YOU BRING
- 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 builder — through code and architecture, not just meetings
- Strong product instincts and an eye for customer experience, performance, and polish
- A strong point of view on how AI is reshaping product engineering
- Ability to move fast in a 0?1 / high-growth environment with imperfect requirements
Our stack: C#/Python, FastAPI, Vue/Nuxt, PostgreSQL, real-time event streams. You don't need every one, but you should be dangerous across most of it.
WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT
Most marketplace engineering roles are maintenance: keep the site up, ship the next ticket.
This one is different. Our inventory is chaotic and one-of-a-kind, our auctions are live, and our customers come for the hunt. You'll own the systems that turn that into a daily habit — and you'll have the autonomy and equity of someone shaping a category-defining product from the ground up.
You'll work directly with leadership to define how BuyWander wins on the customer side.
BENEFITS
- Competitive salary + performance bonuses
- Meaningful equity in a category-defining company
- Health, Vision & Dental Insurance
- Unlimited PTO
- Annual Company Offsites
- 401K
BuyWander is an Equal Opportunity Employer.