TL;DR

Principal Engineer SaaS, GoLang, Postgres, AWS, AI | Seattle

PDM Automotive is the fastest-growing tech startup in the aftermarket parts industry. We make the discovery of automotive parts easier for billions of purchases. Our customers are brands and major online retailers. We deal with complex and large data sets and integrate them with various external systems. We recently re-platformed our backend. Tech stack: GoLang, gRPC, JSONB, Postgres, ReactJS, AWS, OpenAI.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer who works closely with the technical co-founder and Head of Product, driving tech decisions, mentoring the engineering team of seven, and wants to be hands-on in platform architecture and software development.

Salary up to $200K + significant equity + benefits

About PDM Automotive

PDM Automotive, based in Seattle, revolutionizes how automotive parts brands reach billions of shoppers worldwide. Since 2018, PDM has become the industry's leading and fastest-growing Product Information Management (PIM) provider, partnering with the largest brands to drive digital transformation. In an industry over a century old, PDM is at the forefront of change, becoming the single platform for the entire industry to collaborate. Our vision is to simplify over 1B annual transactions across local retail and eCommerce. We are venture-backed by leading VC investors.

Role Description

This is a full-time role in Seattle for a Principal Engineer at PDM Automotive. You will be the most senior engineer working alongside the technical co-founder and Head of Product. You will be the go-to person for our most challenging and complex technical problems and be a mentor to our team of amazing early-career engineers. This role is primarily located in the Greater Seattle Area for collaborative in-person work with some flexibility for remote work. You will report to the Head of Product and work closely alongside our technical co-founder. We have the leading PIM system in the automotive market, with happy, paying customers. You will be working on new features and our extensive product roadmap to reach our vision. Your time will be spent 15% advising the leadership team on technical strategy and roadmap planning, 15% managing and mentoring the engineering team, 70% hands-on in platform architecture and software development.

What the role isn’t

This isn’t a job with a large “mega corp” where you clock in at 9am and out at 5pm. The role will be challenging and demanding but also incredibly rewarding and fun for the right individual. There won’t be endless meetings with a lot of people trying to create the perfect plan for every task. We’ll be flying the plane while building it, and mistakes will be made. Perfect is the enemy of good here and we’re all human. It’s how we respond to these mistakes that creates raving fans that will help accelerate our growth.

About you

You’re excited by the opportunity to get in early at a fast-growing, venture-backed startup where you can use your skills to make a real impact on the company’s growth. You’re an amazing platform architect and software engineer and always the person other engineers come to for help because you have the ability to quickly spot issues and help fix them. You take full responsibility for your work, you work hard, solve problems, and you want to be rewarded based on the value you deliver. You’re able to take ownership of a never-ending list of work to be done and have a bias for getting sh*t done instead of aiming for perfection. You have the confidence to push back on anything you don’t agree with and also to be transparent when you don’t know something. You can deal with constant challenges with enthusiasm knowing that solving those challenges is what brings value. No task is beneath you and you’re willing to do what it takes to better the business.

“You need 2 types of people to keep early-stage startups from stagnating:

- someone who’ll shamelessly sell the product before it’s fully ready to be sold (this is our CEO/founder)

- someone who’s embarrassed by this and will push to improve the product faster” (this is you!)"

What's in it for you

PDM is venture-backed. We offer a stimulating, high-growth environment. Base compensation is market rate – with tremendous upside with equity (stock options). The automotive aftermarket parts industry's revenue exceeds $1T annually and our vision is to be involved in every transaction. You will be working directly with the technical co-founder and have vast influence on technical decisions.

Skills we need you to have already

• Having built, led, and mentored well-performing, healthy engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to make sound platform architectural decisions
• Experience with large databases and scaling, ideally in Postgres
• JSONB querying knowledge
• Working with Golang using gRPC - ideally with at-scale streaming experience

Skills that are a bonus

• AWS (Fargate and MSK specifically)
• CD/CI pipeline
• Go automated testing (ideally with Ginkgo/Gomega)
• Experience in automotive or e-commerce industries is a plus
• It would be great if you’re a gearhead or car enthusiast