Staff / Principal Engineer – Event-Driven Systems

Phoenix is the Autonomous Commerce Platform for DTC Founders. We unify storefronts, checkout, payments, and operations into one platform where AI agents handle the operational grind and merchants focus on growth.

We set out to build the "Shopify of Direct Response" and along the way recognized something bigger. Direct response is roughly a third of all ecommerce transactions, a trillion-dollar market chronically overlooked by Silicon Valley. The merchants who run it are obsessive about tooling.

They live and die by velocity, conversion, and margin. They have no brand moats. They only compete on operations, which is exactly what makes them ripe for agentic disruption and the earliest, fastest adopters of AI agents in commerce.

That insight reframed Phoenix from "the Shopify of DR" to theAI Agent Platform for DTC Founders.

This is a category-defining bet, and we are running at it from a position of strength.

Where We Are Today

• 8-figure ARR growing 100%+ YoY

• Strong unit economics and efficient growth

• Rapid merchant adoption and expanding market presence

• Backed by experienced operators and investors with a history of building and scaling successful businesses

Why Now

This is a rare opportunity for a technical leader to step into a company with proven revenue, product-market fit, an established team, and a large market opportunity.

Three things make this an inflection point:

• Product-market fit is established. Demand continues to grow, merchant adoption is accelerating, and Phoenix is outperforming expectations.

• There is an opportunity to define a category. While many companies are building AI tools for commerce, few are focused on helping sophisticated DTC operators automate revenue-generating decisions at scale.

• Our customers are AI-ready. They adopt technology quickly when it drives measurable business outcomes, creating an ideal environment for agentic products.

The Role

We are hiring a Principal / Staff Backend Engineer to design and own the distributed systems and event architecture that connect Phoenix's core commerce applications, data platform, and intelligent decisioning systems.

This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, event-driven architecture, and data infrastructure. You will work across Checkout, Payments, Subscriptions, Platform, and AI to define how transactional data is modeled, how domain events are produced and consumed, and how operational data flows reliably into systems such as ClickHouse.

The systems you build will become the foundation for:

• Merchant intelligence grounded in trusted commerce data
• Smart payment approval and routing optimization
• Checkout conversion optimization
• Retention and churn signals
• Future predictive, adaptive, and autonomous commerce systems

This is production distributed-systems engineering, where application architecture, transactional data, events, and data infrastructure meet.

You will design for low latency, correctness, replayability, idempotency, observability, and clear ownership boundaries. Just as importantly, you will help Phoenix fix data problems at the source - evolving application schemas and domain models so downstream systems do not have to compensate for inconsistent operational data.

What You'll Own

Own Event-Driven Commerce Architecture

Design the event architecture connecting Checkout, Payments, Subscriptions, CRM, and other commerce systems. Define event semantics, contracts, versioning, ordering, idempotency, replayability, failure handling, and observability so events can be safely consumed across products and platforms.

Evolve Core Commerce Data Models

Partner directly with backend teams to improve Phoenix's operational data models across orders, payments, subscriptions, customers, merchants, and related domains. Simplify immature or legacy schemas, establish clear domain boundaries and invariants, and ensure data structures support transactional workflows, event-driven systems, analytics, and intelligent decisioning.

Connect Applications to the Data Platform

Establish the architecture for moving operational data reliably from systems such as Aurora into ClickHouse and other downstream consumers through CDC, streaming, and domain events. Define clear contracts between application systems and the data platform and eliminate unnecessary one-off pipelines. Build the shared, traceable data interfaces needed to support production use cases such as payment routing, approval scoring, checkout optimization, merchant intelligence, experimentation, and closed-loop optimization.

Set Technical Direction Across Teams

Establish shared architectural patterns and standards across Platform, Payments, Checkout, and AI. Lead the hardest cross-cutting changes, influence application teams at the source, and create foundations that teams can extend without making this role a bottleneck.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 10+ years of professional experience in backend, infrastructure, platform, or distributed-systems engineering, including significant technical leadership in production environments at scale.
• Strong experience with event-driven architectures, asynchronous systems, and data-intensive applications.
• Strong understanding of transactional data modeling, consistency, idempotency, ordering, retries, failure modes, and distributed-systems tradeoffs.
• Experience designing domain events, event schemas, data contracts, or shared data models consumed by multiple systems or teams.
• Experience with streaming, CDC, messaging, or other infrastructure that moves operational data between systems reliably.
• Strong database fundamentals and the ability to reason about operational schemas, query patterns, data lifecycle, and schema evolution. Experience with Aurora/MySQL or other high-scale transactional databases.
• Comfort working directly in backend application code and across the boundary between application architecture and data infrastructure.
• Staff / Principal-level ability to set technical direction, drive ambiguous cross-team initiatives, and influence engineers and leaders without relying on direct authority.
• Startup mindset: comfortable owning ambiguous, high-impact domains and balancing long-term architecture with practical delivery.

Preferred

• Experience in ecommerce, payments, subscriptions, fintech, or other transaction-heavy domains.
• Experience with ClickHouse, ClickPipes, or similar real-time analytical databases and CDC platforms.
• Experience with event streaming technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, Flink, or similar systems.
• Experience building low-latency decisioning, scoring, routing, or experimentation systems.
• Understanding of data requirements for AI/agentic systems, including grounding, feature readiness, decision traceability, and feedback loops.
• Experience preparing data for ML models, feature platforms, or predictive systems.
• Experience with TypeScript/Node.js and modern AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Leadership Traits We Value

• High ownership

• Decisiveness

• Strong recruiting and talent development capabilities

• Accountability

• Product judgment

• Calm under pressure

• Builder mentality

Culture

These are the values that guide how we operate:

• All In to Win - Operate with urgency, intensity, and a relentless bar for excellence.

• A Players Only - Only hire, develop, and keep A players. Protect talent density.

• Merchant First - Merchants are why we exist. Every decision measured by merchant impact.

• Entrepreneurial Spirit - Move like a Day One company. Fast, scrappy, hungry. Everyone owns.

• Execution Over Ego - Best ideas win regardless of source. Status and titles do not matter.