Lead Engineer - Commerce Core (Python Backend)

Why Fulfil
Fulfil is a technical founder-led, bootstrapped company in our 11th year of operations. We're a small team of exceptional engineers powering millions of orders for brands like HexClad, Ridge Wallet, and Caraway. You won't be a tech lead buried in meetings — you'll be hands-on, driving technical direction while still shipping code.

At a large company, leads spend their days in alignment meetings and writing strategy docs. Here, you'll design systems, mentor engineers, and see your decisions impact merchants processing millions of dollars daily.

The Team
Commerce Core owns order management, inventory, fulfillment, purchasing, and warehouse management. The north star: orders flow without human intervention.

A Typical Week

• Monday: Define the technical roadmap for Q2 with the Product Lead. Two major merchants are scaling 5x — prioritize the infrastructure work.
• Tuesday: Deep dive on order allocation performance. Current p99 is 2s; design a path to 200ms.
• Wednesday: Mentor a Senior Engineer on their first major architecture project. Review their design, push back on complexity.
• Thursday: Ship a critical fix yourself. Some weeks you're 80% code, some weeks 20%.
• Friday: Interview a Staff Engineer candidate. Debrief with the team. Make the call.

What You'll Own

• Technical roadmap for Commerce Core
• Architecture decisions that affect millions of orders
• Performance and reliability of core systems
• Growing Senior Engineers into Leads
• Cross-team technical coordination

What We're Looking For

• 6-9 years building backend systems at scale
• Track record of technical leadership (formal or informal)
• You've designed systems that others now maintain
• Deep expertise in Python and PostgreSQL
• Strong opinions, loosely held
• You make teams around you better

Tech Stack
Python PostgreSQL Redis Celery RabbitMQ SQLAlchemy Kubernetes pytest Claude Code

Hiring Process

• Initial interview — Technical leadership experience
• Live coding — Yes, leads still code here
• Interview loop — Architecture, mentorship, bar raiser
• Bootcamp — Leads also start in Product Support to learn how merchants use Fulfil