Software Development Lead — Marketplace

BuyWander•Seattle, WA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Build the Product Millions Will Fall in Love With 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

Requirements

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.

Responsibilities

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
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
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
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
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
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