Senior Backend Engineer – San Francisco

About the role

Short Story is an award‑winning, technology‑powered retailer focused on petite women. As a Senior Backend Engineer you will design and build the services that power core workflows such as order processing, logistics and internal operations, working closely with product, frontend and operations teams.

Key responsibilities

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

Required profile

• 5+ years of software development experience, including 2+ years with Python.
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms and relational databases (Postgres preferred).
• Familiarity with infrastructure, monitoring and CI/CD practices.
• Experience designing stable, scalable, well‑documented APIs.

Required skills

• Python
• Python web framework (e.g., Flask, Django)
• Testing frameworks
• Docker (containerized workloads)
• PostgreSQL
• SQL

What we offer

• Generous paid time off.
• Comprehensive health, vision and dental coverage.
• 401k with company match.
• Employee discount on merchandise.
• Option to work onsite in San Francisco or remotely in the US or Canada.
• Opportunity to join a Y‑Combinator‑backed startup.