Senior Software Engineer

🚀 Why Zest?
Most of ecommerce is built for "I'm buying this for myself." But the moment someone tries to buy for someone else, everything breaks.
Don't know your friend's address? You're texting them and spoiling the surprise. Need to send 100 client gifts? You're checking out 100 times or filling out a "Contact Us" form and hoping someone replies.
It's a terrible experience at the exact moment customers want to spend money, and brands lose revenue because of it.
That's the problem we solve.
We make sending 1, 10, or 1,000 gifts as easy as buying for yourself. No spreadsheets, no back-and-forth, no friction. And it's working: we power gifting for 100+ top brands like Lindt Chocolate, Levain Bakery, Dandelion Chocolate, and Brightland. We're a ~10-person, profitable team growing 3X+ year-over-year.
Now, we're looking for another Senior Software Engineer to help us build the infrastructure behind effortless gifting at scale — to tackle hard problems across payments, integrations, and real-time commerce, and to raise the bar on how we ship software as Zest grows.

💪 As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll:

• Own features end-to-end — from data model to API to UI — in a full-stack codebase.
• Build and maintain integrations with major ecommerce platforms and payment providers.
• Work hand in hand with both co-founders to shape product direction and make technical decisions that compound.
• Design reliable systems on AWS that handle real money and real orders.
• Improve the developer experience — faster feedback loops, less toil — so the whole team ships with more confidence.
• Mentor teammates, review code thoughtfully, and help set the engineering standards Zest will grow on for years.

👋 You're a good fit if:

• You have 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally at startups where you wore many hats.
• You're comfortable across the full stack and operating independently.
• You have strong opinions (loosely held) about code quality, API design, and data modeling.
• You've built and shipped products that real people depend on and have good intuition for delivering value to users.
• You're pragmatic: you reach for the simplest approach that solves the problem and know when not to abstract.
• You think in systems but ship in increments. You'd rather get something into users' hands and learn than design the perfect architecture in a vacuum.
• Bonus: Experience with ecommerce platforms, payment systems, or checkout flows.

🎁 What we offer:

• The chance to shape engineering at a fast-growing startup. This isn't a role where you pick up tickets from a backlog — you'll be deciding what to build and how to build it.
• Benefits: Health, vision, and dental insurance, unlimited PTO, and yes — excellent gifts.

📍 Where we work:
Remote-first across the U.S., with an NYC office if you want it.