{"id":1300181,"url":"https://alion.io/job/phoenix-technologies-staff-principal-engineer-event-driven-systems","title":"Staff / Principal Engineer – Event-Driven Systems","company":{"id":3261197,"name":"Phoenix Technologies","domain":"phoenixtechnologies.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/phoenixtechnologies","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":139000,"max_usd":271000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":153},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Aurora","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"Flink","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-29T18:04:49Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T10:32:40Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":94,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":93},"description":"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.\nWe 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.\nThey 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.\nThat insight reframed Phoenix from \"the Shopify of DR\" to theAI Agent Platform for DTC Founders.\nThis is a category-defining bet, and we are running at it from a position of strength.\nWhere We Are Today\n8-figure ARR growing 100%+ YoY\n\nStrong unit economics and efficient growth\n\nRapid merchant adoption and expanding market presence\n\nBacked by experienced operators and investors with a history of building and scaling successful businesses\n\nWhy Now\nThis 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.\nThree things make this an inflection point:\nProduct-market fit is established. Demand continues to grow, merchant adoption is accelerating, and Phoenix is outperforming expectations.\n\nThere 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.\n\nOur customers are AI-ready. They adopt technology quickly when it drives measurable business outcomes, creating an ideal environment for agentic products.\n\nThe Role\nWe 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.\nThis 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.\nThe systems you build will become the foundation for:\nMerchant intelligence grounded in trusted commerce data\nSmart payment approval and routing optimization\nCheckout conversion optimization\nRetention and churn signals\nFuture predictive, adaptive, and autonomous commerce systems\nThis is production distributed-systems engineering, where application architecture, transactional data, events, and data infrastructure meet.\nYou 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.\nWhat You'll Own\nOwn Event-Driven Commerce Architecture\nDesign 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.\nEvolve Core Commerce Data Models\nPartner 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.\nConnect Applications to the Data Platform\nEstablish 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.\nSet Technical Direction Across Teams\nEstablish 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.\nWhat We're Looking For\nRequired\n10+ years of professional experience in backend, infrastructure, platform, or distributed-systems engineering, including significant technical leadership in production environments at scale.\nStrong experience with event-driven architectures, asynchronous systems, and data-intensive applications.\nStrong understanding of transactional data modeling, consistency, idempotency, ordering, retries, failure modes, and distributed-systems tradeoffs.\nExperience designing domain events, event schemas, data contracts, or shared data models consumed by multiple systems or teams.\nExperience with streaming, CDC, messaging, or other infrastructure that moves operational data between systems reliably.\nStrong 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.\nComfort working directly in backend application code and across the boundary between application architecture and data infrastructure.\nStaff / Principal-level ability to set technical direction, drive ambiguous cross-team initiatives, and influence engineers and leaders without relying on direct authority.\nStartup mindset: comfortable owning ambiguous, high-impact domains and balancing long-term architecture with practical delivery.\nPreferred\nExperience in ecommerce, payments, subscriptions, fintech, or other transaction-heavy domains.\nExperience with ClickHouse, ClickPipes, or similar real-time analytical databases and CDC platforms.\nExperience with event streaming technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, Flink, or similar systems.\nExperience building low-latency decisioning, scoring, routing, or experimentation systems.\nUnderstanding of data requirements for AI/agentic systems, including grounding, feature readiness, decision traceability, and feedback loops.\nExperience preparing data for ML models, feature platforms, or predictive systems.\nExperience with TypeScript/Node.js and modern AI-assisted engineering workflows.\nLeadership Traits We Value\nHigh ownership\n\nDecisiveness\n\nStrong recruiting and talent development capabilities\n\nAccountability\n\nProduct judgment\n\nCalm under pressure\n\nBuilder mentality\n\nCulture\nThese are the values that guide how we operate:\nAll In to Win - Operate with urgency, intensity, and a relentless bar for excellence.\n\nA Players Only - Only hire, develop, and keep A players. Protect talent density.\n\nMerchant First - Merchants are why we exist. Every decision measured by merchant impact.\n\nEntrepreneurial Spirit - Move like a Day One company. Fast, scrappy, hungry. Everyone owns.\n\nExecution Over Ego - Best ideas win regardless of source. Status and titles do not matter.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7609,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Commerce","Law Enforcement"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T11:14:40Z"}],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.325,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":93,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:26","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/phoenix-technologies-staff-principal-engineer-event-driven-systems","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/phoenix-technologies-staff-principal-engineer-event-driven-systems.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T19:43:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2381,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2619,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}