Staff Software Engineer, Guest Lifecycle & Loyalty

Owner.com

9d•$220,000 - $240,000•Remote

About The Position

Owner is building an AI-native system for local business owners, starting with restaurants. This system aims to replace multiple tools by powering everything from the restaurant's website, online ordering, CRM, and POS. The product philosophy is that Owner does the work for the business owner, driving demand, converting it, and assisting with day-to-day operations. The vision is to help independent restaurants succeed online and then scale this solution to all local businesses. Since 2020, Owner has generated significant revenue, processed over a billion dollars in online orders, and helped over 20,000 restaurant owners. The team consists of hundreds of top talents from leading companies in SMB software. Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. Some roles prioritize in-person collaboration, but most teammates are distributed globally. The Guest Lifecycle & Loyalty (LILO) team is responsible for building a world-class, automated marketing agency for restaurants on Owner. They manage messaging, loyalty, and intelligence to convert first-time guests into repeat customers across email, SMS, and push notifications. This includes systems for segmentation, experimentation, and measurement to grow repeat orders and lifetime value. Their work involves scaling high-volume communications, improving attribution and experimentation, and enhancing customer data quality for personalization. The team is at an inflection point, with foundational elements in place, enabling them to focus on radical personalization at both the restaurant and guest levels, potentially utilizing LLMs and classic ML systems.

Requirements

Staff-level technical leadership.
A track record of owning and driving ambitious, multi-person initiatives that cross team boundaries — from a vague but exciting idea through to measurable, durable impact. (Typically 8+ years of relevant experience.)
A multiplier mindset.
You make the engineers around you better — through mentorship, high standards, thoughtful design review, and the patterns and systems you leave behind.
Strong backend and systems depth.
Comfort designing reliable, high-scale services and data pipelines, with good instincts for where to invest in robustness and where to move fast.
A data- and experimentation-driven mindset.
You reach for holdouts, incrementality, and measurement to know what's actually working — and you're excited to apply ML and AI to real product problems.
Comfort with ambiguity and a bias for impact.
You turn open-ended, aspirational goals into concrete technical bets, and you're energized rather than daunted by problems nobody has solved yet.
Clear communication and influence.
You align stakeholders and move decisions across teams without relying on authority.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for the personalization platform — the systems that decide who we reach, when, on which channel, and with what creative, item, and offer — and chart the path from today's foundation toward an increasingly autonomous, agent-assisted future.
Build the intelligence layer, combining LLM-powered and classic ML approaches to personalize marketing at restaurant and guest scale, where cost and latency mean we can't just reach for a model call every time.
Own the hard, high-leverage problems that make all of this possible and trustworthy — reliable high-volume sending, an experimentation and measurement engine teams can trust, and the data quality that great personalization depends on.
Turn one-off campaign work into a durable platform, so launching a new guest journey becomes configuration rather than a bespoke engineering project — creating leverage for the entire team.
Amplify the engineers around you — set the technical bar, mentor and grow engineers within and beyond LILO, lead design reviews, and leave the people and systems you touch meaningfully better.
Help shape the roadmap alongside Product, Data, and Marketing, bringing clarity to ambiguous, open-ended problems and helping decide what we take on next.