Principal Software Engineer, XPOS

Company Description

Since we opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely, and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take payments and never miss a sale, we saw sellers stymied by disparate, outmoded products and tools that wouldn’t work together.

So we expanded into software and started building integrated, omnichannel solutions – to help sellers sell online, manage inventory, offer buy now, pay later functionality through Afterpay, book appointments, engage loyal buyers, and hire and pay staff. Across it all, we’ve embedded financial services tools at the point of sale, so merchants can access a business loan and manage their cash flow in one place. Afterpay furthers our goal to provide omnichannel tools that unlock meaningful value and growth, enabling sellers to capture the next generation shopper, increase order sizes, and compete at a larger scale.

Today, we are a partner to sellers of all sizes – large, enterprise-scale businesses with complex operations, sellers just starting, as well as merchants who began selling with Square and have grown larger over time. As our sellers grow, so do our solutions. There is a massive opportunity in front of us. We’re building a significant, meaningful, and lasting business, and we are helping sellers worldwide do the same.

Job Description

The Point of Sale (POS) mobile applications are the main entry point through which merchants interact with Square. The cross point of sale team known as “XPOS” is an engineering organization of 70+ software engineers responsible for building shared features that are shared across the fleet of Square’s point-of-sale apps and foundational components used by Square’s mobile developers. The team is part of the larger Upmarket Foundation organization that is responsible for the needs of new and existing Upmarket sellers. XPOS team’s mission is to win new markets quickly, retain existing sellers easily, and scale upmarket with unparalleled reliability and efficiency. This role directly reports into the XPOS engineering lead. 

Engineers at this level are organizational leaders who drive and influence the technical direction of their organization to ensure success of strategic initiatives. As a Principal Engineer, you will be working closely with all the engineering teams within the XPOS organization and help them define the long-term technical vision, e.g. APIs and frameworks that support our mobile applications, Square Dashboard experience on the web, etc. You will architect, implement, and scale strategic solutions spanning multiple product teams and business organizations, including external stakeholders. 

To learn more about Point of Sale:

https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/software

Responsibilities

• Guide and participate in critical technical, design, and product discussions with leaders across our various product and engineering teams and actively contribute to the codebase.

• Drive and influence cross org technical efforts and our most complicated technical problems. Be responsible for the successful delivery of projects including planning, documenting processes and infrastructure, determining operation metrics, rollout, and maintenance.

• Inspire a team of 70+ software engineers and influence the Square ecosystem of products.

• Uplevel the technical design and product understanding for the team & lead other team members. 

• Develop new best practices for the team to achieve operational excellence.

• Be a pivotal partner for Engineering Leadership & Leadership for cross functional stakeholders.

• Sample projects include designing and scaling internally and externally-facing APIs that support critical business functionality such as building Add Ons framework, Checkout and Remote Settings management. 

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience developing production software for large scale consumer facing mobile applications.

• Proven track record of results as a Principal Engineer level or above in a large engineering organization at a top-tier tech company.

• Adept at providing detailed technical guidance while driving big picture strategy.

• Experience building component-based web apps with modern JavaScript front-end frameworks (e.g. React, Vue, Angular, or Ember).

• Experience architecting highly scalable backend systems in Java, Go, or Ruby.

• Experience with AWS or other cloud platforms.

• Experience envisioning and socializing technical solutions, socializing it and aligning partners for successful implementation.

• Passion for mentoring and upleveling team members.

• Experience balancing urgency to implement vs technically correct solution.

• Advanced Degree in Com