Staff Software Engineer

About Rent the Runway: 

Rent the Runway is transforming the way modern women get dressed and disrupting the $2.4 trillion fashion industry by pioneering dynamic ownership and enabling women to rent, subscribe to and purchase secondhand clothing.  Founded in 2009 with a vision to build the world’s first living closet, RTR believes that women everywhere will soon have a subscription to fashion. By creating a new model of dynamic ownership rooted in sustainability, RTR has made apparel rental an indispensable utility while also powering women to feel their best every day. RTR offers apparel, accessories and home decor from over 700 designer partners and has built in-house proprietary technology and a one-of-a-kind reverse logistics operation. Under CEO and Co-Founder Jennifer Hyman’s leadership, Rent the Runway has been named to CNBC’s “Disruptor 50” five times in ten years, and has been placed on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list multiple times.

About the Team:

Recognising Ireland’s significant technology talent, Rent the Runway aims to hire 150 engineers and tech developers over the next three years. Our team, based in the historic Claddagh area of Galway city centre, will tackle core technology challenges that are critical to Rent the Runway’s overall success and will influence the future of the next generation of services.  

The centre in Galway is the first operation for Rent the Runway outside of the US. The new international office will enable the company to expand its Software Engineering, Product Development, and Data Science footprint, and Rent the Runway's Galway based employees have the opportunity to launch or grow their careers across several roles in Technology. 

Our engineering team is smart, pragmatic, and entrepreneurial.  We practice continuous integration & test-driven development, engage in constant peer code reviews & pair programming, and work hard to give back to the software community through open-source contributions.

Our Site Performance team is a passionate group of engineers dedicated to improving the scale and performance of our main customer site and its underlying systems. You’ll help revamp public facing APIs, restructure our site architecture, and fine tune service calls for optimal performance.  

About the Job:

Staff Engineers are the most senior engineers in our organisation and are expected to have a wide range of professional experience as engineers across a variety of technologies, both developing software from the ground up as well as maintaining and improving existing systems. They work closely with engineers of all levels across the organisation and act as the focal points for architectural decisions, provide mentorship, and help continually improve our practice. While not a management role, it is definitely a leadership role and is expected to set the standard for communication, initiative and collaboration we expect in our engineers.  

As a Staff Engineer on our Site Performance team, you will work with a passionate group of engineers to improve the scale and performance of our main customer site and its underlying systems. You’ll help revamp our public APIs, restructure our site architecture, and fine-tune service calls for optimal performance. 

We are at an important inflection point in the growth of RTR’s engineering practice and platform, and we are looking for experienced engineers who have a desire to take a great product and bring it to the next level of scalability and performance. Our focus will be unlocking engineering velocity across the Consumer organisation as well as finding opportunities to improve performance for our customers. 

What You'll Do:

• Improve our APIs and underlying site infrastructure to optimise load times and improve developer velocity. 
• Help lead and execute in the backend efforts to re-architect our Consumer microservices to improve scalability and performance. 
• Assist in the planning and execution in migrating our Consumer services to the cloud. 
• Drive technical projects to success and provide mentorship in a fast-paced startup environment
• Contribute technically to projects by being a hands-on coder and removing roadblocks
• Assist in prioritisation efforts, planning future roadmaps, and providing mentorship to others
• You'll work without being limited to the following technologies: Dropwizard, Java, MySql, Mongo, Ruby, Python, Kinesis, Swift, Sinatra, React Native.

About you:

• BA/BS in Computer Science, a related degree, or Technical Lead level equivalent practical experience
• Past experience building performant consumer-facing applications at scale
• An obsession with optimising consumer applications for speed and performance
• Experience with performance profiling and load testing tools 
• A strong command of best practices, design patterns, and system architecture tradeoffs
• Knowledge of various types of data stores, and their pros-and-cons
• Experience with distributed system performance analysis and optimisation
• Ability to understand, diagnose, and effectively articulate technical challenges and solutions
• High level of comfort navigating ambiguity and make the tradeoffs without compromising quality
• Experience in modern frameworks and design patterns (MVC, REST, Swagger/OpenAPI)
• The ideal candidate will have previous experience with cloud migration – refactor & re-architecture of consumer facing applications and data stores.

Benefits: 

At Rent the Runway, we’re committed to the happiness and wellbeing of our employees, and aim to create a workplace that fosters both personal and professional growth. Our inclusive benefits include, but are not limited to:

• Generous Paid Time Off including annual leave, paid bereavement, and family sick leave - every employee needs time to take care of themselves and their family.
• Universal Paid Parental Leave for both parents + flexible return to work program  - because we know your newest family member(s) deserve your undivided attention.
• Paid Sabbatical after 5 years of continuous service - Unplug, recharge, and have some fun!  
• Competitive Stakeholder Pension - taking care of your future. 
• Comprehensive health, dental care and dependents care from day 1 of employment - Your health comes first and we’ve got you covered. 
• Company wide events and outings - our team spirit is no joke - we know how to have fun!
• Flexibility Policy - when our corporate employees return to the office post COVID they will have the option to work remotely 2-3 days a week

Rent the Runway is an equal opportunity employer. In accordance with applicable law, we prohibit discrimination against any applicant or employee on any legally-recognised basis, including, but not limited to: gender, marital status, family status, age disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, and membership of the Traveller community.

#LI - EM1