About the position
Zappos is seeking a Software Development Engineer to join our Catalog Discovery team. As a SDE, you will drive design and implementation decisions that enhance the customer experience, making it easier and more fun for customers to find the products they want. You will be responsible for designing and building scalable systems that power our world-class selection of Shoes, Kids, and Active wear across both platforms. A key focus of this role will be defining and implementing significant improvements to our Product Listing Pages (PLP) and Product Detail Pages (PDP) for both Zappos and our sister company Shopbop. You'll architect next-generation search and discovery experiences that enhance relevancy, filtering capabilities, and the overall customer journey. You will also contribute to Zappos systems across the new product lifecycle, from buying products, capturing product details, and generating best-in-class product imagery through innovative technical solutions. This includes developing innovative solutions for faceted navigation, personalized product recommendations, and unified catalog data models that serve both brands while maintaining their unique identities. You'll leverage technologies including LLM and ML tooling to push the boundaries of what's possible in e-commerce product discovery while ensuring consistent performance at scale.
Responsibilities
- Design and develop scalable, high-performance Java-based applications utilizing AWS services (ECS, SQS, S3, DynamoDB)
- Lead technical initiatives to improve the accuracy and efficiency of our catalog systems
- Architect and implement next-generation search and discovery experiences for Product Listing Pages (PLP) across Zappos and Shopbop
- Design and build enhanced Product Detail Page (PDP) systems that optimize for conversion, customer engagement, and cross-selling opportunities
- Develop innovative solutions to improve search relevancy, faceted navigation, and personalized product recommendations
- Create unified catalog data models that serve both Zappos and Shopbop while maintaining brand-specific customer experiences
- Push technical horizons by implementing technologies including LLM and ML tooling for improved product discovery
- Partner with product managers, UX designers, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into elegant technical solutions
- Mentor junior developers by providing meaningful feedback and raising the bar on coding standards
- Drive architecture and technology choices that enable elegant, practical, and maintainable code
- Work backwards from customer problems to design and implement solutions optimized for speed and scalability
- Create technical documentation and decision records to build alignment with senior management and engineering teams
- Dive deep with engineering teams to refine requirements and unblock technical challenges
Requirements
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent
Nice-to-haves
- 5+ years of programming using a modern programming language such as Java, C++, or C#, including object-oriented design experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Expertise in Java development with modern frameworks and AWS technologies (DynamoDB, ECS, SQS, SNS, S3), plus experience with both relational and non-relational databases
