About Howl

Howl is the creator platform for social commerce. We build tools for brands and creators to sell more products across every social platform, together.

In the last 10 years, the $20bn influencer ecommerce market has become a critical part of the retail industry.  It has evolved into social commerce, a new $1.2 trillion market opportunity (link) requiring new tools, protocols, and technologies.  

Howl enables creators and brands to run experiments on what products to talk about and how best to talk about them. Paired with data delivered at the speed of social, creator financing for products, and feedback loops delivered in a beautifully designed platform, Howl takes the guesswork out of selling products on social platforms.

Howl’s mission is to reduce barriers for creators and brands to build social commerce businesses.  We are a remote-first company with a diverse team that reflects our vision. Our beta launched in mid 2022 and powers social commerce for creators and brands across beauty, gaming, home, fashion, and consumer electronics for both industry leaders like Best Buy, Samsung, Target and cult favorites like Cariuma, Kosas, and Youth to the People. We are a Series A company backed by investors including HighlandX and NEA. 

For more information, visit www.planethowl.com.

About the Role

As a software engineer, you'll have a direct impact on the customer experience for creators and brands alike. You will work on building the core interaction our clients have with the Howl platform. These interactions include helping creators and brands discover each other, building tools that allow creators to monetize their social content and get paid on time, and optimize for a brand’s performance marketing campaigns, to name a few.

Are you passionate about scalability and disrupting the e-commerce space? Do you want to make significant contributions to its success? If you answered yes to these questions, then you should apply to join our team. This is a great opportunity for someone who can strategize and complete large scale projects and wants a sizable impact on the entire company. We’re looking for someone who is curious about building product-led initiatives while improving efficiency, performance and reliability of the application.

You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will:

  • Provide technical and design leadership within an engineering team.
  • Master the code base, toolchain, and development processes.
  • Work with product management partners to articulate requirements and agree on designs for components.
  • Negotiate interfaces between your components and others in the Howl system.
  • Design software components and subsystems for Howl's products or infrastructure.
  • Implement high-quality software components and subsystems with your team.
  • Document the architecture of your designs at the block diagram level.
  • Write technical documents as needed to memorialize design and implementation decisions and rationales.
  • May serve as tech lead (player-coach) of an implementation team.
  • Drive implementation of automated testing for your components.
  • Contribute to refinement and enrichment of development tools and processes.
  • Participate in risk analysis and risk management exercises with engineering leadership.

We’re Excited About You Because You Bring:

  • 6+ years of software development experience
  • Knowledge of multiple back-end languages (e.g. Python, GoLang, Java) and JavaScript frameworks (e.g. React, Angular)
  • Familiarity with databases (e.g. MySQL, Snowflake).
  • Experience with web frameworks at scale (e.g Next.js, GraphQL)
  • Ability to instrument and debug distributed systems.
  • Dedication to keep up with new developments in tech.
  • Strong communication and organizational skills, motivation to achieve results in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.

Howl Tech Stack

One of the most frequent questions asked by candidates of Howl engineers is, “What is your tech stack?” This is a brief overview of our tech stack.

  • Howl's systems are implemented as a modern microservices architecture running on Linux servers hosted in AWS. We use Kubernetes to manage our containers, we use Flask to construct our Web interfaces. We build interactivity in our web interfaces using React. 
  • Our favorite programming languages are Python 3, Go, Elixir, and, on the frontend, TypeScript and JavaScript. We stash our code in GitHub.
  • We test each language with an appropriate unit testing tool - PyTest, Cypress, and Jasmine. We use Jenkins to run our builds and tests.
  • Check-ins against the main branch require a code review by another SWE.
  • We keep some data in Snowflake, some in Postgres and Elasticsearch and some, of course, in MySQL. We build our product graph using Neptune. We are working to reduce the number of databases we rely on.
  • We stream data around using Kafka, and Storm. Maybe we will prune/update this list sometime.
  • We are not hostile to commercial software - we use DBT, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Looker, Notion.

The base salary range for this role is $190,000/yr - $230,000/yr USD.

At Howl, we offer a competitive compensation package inclusive of base salary, incentive pay and stock options. Incentive awards are allocated based on individual performance. Certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role. 

Howl is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or veteran status. 

Apply for this Job

* Required
resume chosen  
Dropbox Google Drive
(File types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf)
Cancel
cover_letter chosen  
Dropbox Google Drive
(File types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf)
Cancel

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Howl’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Form CC-305

OMB Control Number 1250-0005

Expires 05/31/2023

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor required by law to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We are also required to measure our progress toward having at least 7% of our workforce be individuals with disabilities. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had a disability. Because a person may become disabled at any time, we ask all of our employees to update their information at least every five years.

Identifying yourself as an individual with a disability is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer will be maintained confidentially and not be seen by selecting officials or anyone else involved in making personnel decisions. Completing the form will not negatively impact you in any way, regardless of whether you have self-identified in the past. For more information about this form or the equal employment obligations of federal contractors under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

You are considered to have a disability if you have a physical or mental impairment or medical condition that substantially limits a major life activity, or if you have a history or record of such an impairment or medical condition.

Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Autism
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, or HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or hard of hearing
  • Depression or anxiety
  • Diabetes
  • Epilepsy
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, or irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual disability
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Nervous system condition for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, or Multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Psychiatric condition, for example, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, or major depression

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.