Startup CTO / Principal Software Engineer

The CTO will be responsible for developing and maintaining our core marketplace platform and features; helping to build, manage and validate our technical road-map; and shape our technical craft and culture.

About Hip eCommerce

It's an exciting time at Hip eCommerce! We just completed our Series Seed round of $500K, led by FJ Labs, and we're now focusing on expanding our core team. Which makes this a unique opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor of a quickly growing, VC backed, eCommerce marketplace startup.

In the past eighteen months, we’ve grown GMV ten fold - to over $6 Million per year, and now have over 1,000 Sellers, 100,000 Members and 10 Million Listings across our three marketplaces: HipStamp.com, HipPostcard.com and HipComic.com.

This role is located in our Raleigh office and will report to the CEO. Relocation packages are available.

About the Engineering Team

The Hip eCommerce marketplace and platform has been developed and maintained by our CEO; and the CTO role will be our first full-time engineer.

While the CTO will be critical in shaping our technical culture, our current thoughts are as follows: we believe that code is craft, that good software and system designs are works of art, and that the work our engineering team produces is core to our mission of re-imagining eCommerce for collectibles. Engineers at Hip eCommerce are not just responsible for engineering - they have product ownership. Engineers are expected to track performance of the features they release, talk with customers, and help shape the future of our business and products.

Our current systems run PHP, MySQL, SphinxSearch, and more. We believe in fast development cycles, clean architecture, MVC / service oriented architecture, and continuous deployment.

Responsibilities:

• Building the core marketplace platform and refactoring existing code to higher quality standards.
• Define our architecture practices; ensure best practices are defined and followed by the engineering team and enhance our overall code quality.
• Connecting business requirements with technical development.
• Developing public and private facing APIs (our long term vision is a serverless architecture).
• You will be a product owner who wants to interact with customers, build and track real business value, breakdown larger projects and goals, and follow-up on the performance and impact of the features you develop.
• On the Product side, you will be involved with: browse and search; catalog and want list services; live bidding; image recognition; payment and shipping; recommendations engines; mobile apps; and more.
• On the DevOps side, you will lead the following: setup new development environments; setup new deployment processes / continuous integration; setup automated testing & QA; upgrade servers to latest Debian / PHP7.

About You:

• You have 7+ years of professional experience with PHP, mySQL and Infrastructure as a Service.
• Strong understanding of common application design patterns including MVC and SOA.
• Experience developing rich consumer facing applications with HTML/CSS/JS.
• Experience creating and consuming RESTful web services.
• Experience writing unit tests and a desire to push everyone to do better.
• Experience with continuous integration and deployment.
• Love to experiment and use data to drive decision-making.
• Great communication skills and the desire to collaborate across departments and with customers.
• You're an entrepreneur at heart, and want to get in on the ground floor of a start-up.

What You'll Get

• Competitive salary and significant stock options.
• Health insurance and a wellness allowance.
• Unlimited vacation and sick days.
• Premium headphones and a subscription to Spotify.
• Unlimited lunch, snacks & drinks.

What's Next

If you're interested in joining the team at Hip eCommerce, please send a cover letter along with your resume telling us why you'd be right for the position. As we build our team, building our culture is extremely important to us, so write to us and tell us what you’re all about!