Backend Engineer at ChowNow

Backend Engineer

ChowNow, Los Angeles, CA or Remote

See jobs at ChowNow

Do you want to build products that connect thousands of food orderers to restaurants

every day? Do you love writing well formatted, unit-tested, and documented code? Does the thought of continuous integration and agile workflow encourage you to craft high-quality and resilient code? Do you feel security, availability, and maintainability are naturally linked to a solid application architecture?

If all() of your answers to the above == True, keep reading; this might be the product building environment you have been searching for.

Our Product and Technology

Our backend applications are written in Python 3. The RESTful APIs we develop enable multiple client-facing platforms, ranging from our website products built with React & Redux to our native mobile applications. We write code to integrate with partners in the restaurant technology space. Depending on our use case, we store data in MySQL RDS, Elasticsearch or Redis.

Our infrastructure-as-code platform is hosted by Amazon Web Services, developed and orchestrated using Ansible and Terraform. We automate as much as we can, utilizing Jenkins for deployments.

About the Position

ChowNow’s Engineering Team has built a reliable, stable, and modern platform enabling restaurant owners to accept pickup and delivery orders online. Our “quality product first” approach to engineering drives the team to succeed and has contributed to the success and growth of the company. We are looking for similarly minded engineers who care deeply about the product, the customers, the team members, and the codebase itself. As Backend Engineer, you will develop solutions to interesting technical problems, explore exciting growth opportunities and have a real impact on our product.

About Us:

ChowNow is unique among tech startups in the restaurant space. We power branded online ordering systems for independent restaurants across North America – via websites, Google, Instagram, and through branded iOS and Android apps – and we do it all for a reasonable monthly fee regardless of order volume. We operate this way because of our belief in being fair, sustainable, and equitable with our restaurant partners. And the same goes for our workplace.

Diversity, teamwork, and mutual respect are among our core company values. And we pride ourselves on giving our teams plenty of opportunities to make their mark. To date we’ve created over 18,000 apps for our restaurant partners – something that’s never been done before in our category. And as we expand to new markets, further spreading the word about the ChowNow difference, those opportunities to create, build, and grow will only increase. If this sounds like the kind of workplace, and the kind of mission, that appeals to you, we’d love to talk.

Learn more by checking out our reviews on Glassdoor (they’re excellent). Together we can preserve neighborhood flavor, one restaurant at a time.

Within 3 months, you'll...

Learn our business model and how it translates to platform architecture and features. We work closely with the product and it influences how we think about the code.
Build, launch, and support your first feature in one of our many products. We ship with iterative agility.
Master development patterns and collaborative processes. We work together to make work efficient.
Write internal documentation and test your features and systems. We take responsibility for communication and quality.

Within 6 months, you'll...

Have made a valued impact on multiple products across our platform. We celebrate our success by measuring our impact, internally and externally.
Understand major feature areas of our applications and be comfortable navigating the stack and infrastructure. We are all generalists, but we specialize in minor feature areas too.
Have participated in the architecture and implementation of new developer and user-facing features. We communicate and collaborate on our architecture to achieve security, scalability, and maximum learning.

Within 12 months, you'll...

Build within reliable estimates. We know this takes time, and we strive to be accurate with each other.
Feel comfortable as a knowledge leader of a particular part of ChowNow platform, contributing teaching and continuing to learn. We want to learn as much as we teach.
Provide feedback during code-reviews of prospective engineers and listen in on telephone screening. We will teach you our interviewing methods.

You Should Apply If:

You have experience building SaaS products, e-commerce or similar online platforms
You are excited about new technologies, and at the same time pragmatic when it comes to adoption of the latest innovations
You constantly work to get better at your craft
You find excitement in learning new business models and transferring such knowledge into beautiful software design
You like collaborating with multiple stakeholders within and outside Engineering Team towards a common goal
You make decisions based on data and evidence
You enjoy iterative, agile development process with frequent releases
You take great pleasure in writing quality, highly maintainable code
You thrive in environments supporting your growth, and where you can support others

About Our Benefits:

Competitive salary
Ongoing training and growth opportunities
A "best place to work" winner multiple times where we focus on creating a great employee experience
Rock solid medical, dental, and vision plans
Mental Health Coverage - we offer several programs to support your mental health and wellness goals.
3 weeks paid vacation; paid holidays; we expect you to work hard, but still enjoy your personal life
Six weeks of fully paid primary parental leave and two weeks secondary leave
401(k) Matching
Employer contributing student loan assistance program
Commuter benefits (including Uber Pool)
Employee Stock Incentive Plan
Quarterly Industry Speakers Series
Quarterly Tech Events (Women, LGBTQ, Diversity, Inclusion)
Consistent & fair leadership: we’ll share info, set clear goals, show you respect, and treat everyone fairly
Enough freedom to spread your wings while still holding you accountable
Fully stocked kitchen and cold brew on tap

As one of ChowNow’s core values, “Celebrates Diversity”, we are committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment. ChowNow is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.

#li-remote

About ChowNow

At ChowNow we are driven by one purpose: to provide restaurants with the tools needed to compete in an increasingly technical world. We believe restaurants are at their best when they focus their efforts on the quality of their food and service. Whether it be in the kitchen preparing for dinner or at the front door greeting customers, these activities are what make a restaurant. Said another way, restaurants excel when they’re working offline. At the same time, we live in a world that more than ever demands convenience, usually brought about by technology. Customers are asking for faster, easier ways to order their meals. Like most people they are busy checking emails, jumping in and out of apps, messaging friends and browsing websites. Said another way, customers live and work online. ChowNow was created to bridge this disconnect. Our products help restaurants get online quickly and easily so they can maintain direct relationships with their customers. As the world evolves and new technology platforms emerge, we will be there to help our restaurant clients stay up to speed online. We cannot control the taste of their food or the friendliness of their staff, but we can arm them with the tools needed to compete in the tech-driven world we all live in. CHRIS WEBB, CEO