Phoenix is the Autonomous Commerce Platform for DTC Founders. We unify storefronts, checkout, payments, and operations into one platform where AI agents handle the operational grind and merchants focus on growth.
We set out to build the "Shopify of Direct Response" and along the way recognized something bigger. Direct response is roughly a third of all ecommerce transactions, a trillion-dollar market chronically overlooked by Silicon Valley. The merchants who run it are obsessive about tooling.
They live and die by velocity, conversion, and margin. They have no brand moats. They only compete on operations, which is exactly what makes them ripe for agentic disruption and the earliest, fastest adopters of AI agents in commerce.
That insight reframed Phoenix from "the Shopify of DR" to the AI Agent Platform for DTC Founders.
This is a category-defining bet, and we are running at it from a position of strength.
8-figure ARR growing 100%+ YoY
Strong unit economics and efficient growth
Rapid merchant adoption and expanding market presence
Backed by experienced operators and investors with a history of building and scaling successful businesses
This is a rare opportunity for a technical leader to step into a company with proven revenue, product-market fit, an established team, and a large market opportunity.
Three things make this an inflection point:
Product-market fit is established. Demand continues to grow, merchant adoption is accelerating, and Phoenix is outperforming expectations.
There is an opportunity to define a category. While many companies are building AI tools for commerce, few are focused on helping sophisticated DTC operators automate revenue-generating decisions at scale.
Our customers are AI-ready. They adopt technology quickly when it drives measurable business outcomes, creating an ideal environment for agentic products.
We are hiring a Principal / Staff Backend Engineer to design and own the distributed systems and event architecture that connect Phoenix's core commerce applications, data platform, and intelligent decisioning systems.
This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, event-driven architecture, and data infrastructure. You will work across Checkout, Payments, Subscriptions, Platform, and AI to define how transactional data is modeled, how domain events are produced and consumed, and how operational data flows reliably into systems such as ClickHouse.
The systems you build will become the foundation for:
This is production distributed-systems engineering, where application architecture, transactional data, events, and data infrastructure meet.
You will design for low latency, correctness, replayability, idempotency, observability, and clear ownership boundaries. Just as importantly, you will help Phoenix fix data problems at the source - evolving application schemas and domain models so downstream systems do not have to compensate for inconsistent operational data.
Design the event architecture connecting Checkout, Payments, Subscriptions, CRM, and other commerce systems. Define event semantics, contracts, versioning, ordering, idempotency, replayability, failure handling, and observability so events can be safely consumed across products and platforms.
Partner directly with backend teams to improve Phoenix's operational data models across orders, payments, subscriptions, customers, merchants, and related domains. Simplify immature or legacy schemas, establish clear domain boundaries and invariants, and ensure data structures support transactional workflows, event-driven systems, analytics, and intelligent decisioning.
Establish the architecture for moving operational data reliably from systems such as Aurora into ClickHouse and other downstream consumers through CDC, streaming, and domain events. Define clear contracts between application systems and the data platform and eliminate unnecessary one-off pipelines. Build the shared, traceable data interfaces needed to support production use cases such as payment routing, approval scoring, checkout optimization, merchant intelligence, experimentation, and closed-loop optimization.
Establish shared architectural patterns and standards across Platform, Payments, Checkout, and AI. Lead the hardest cross-cutting changes, influence application teams at the source, and create foundations that teams can extend without making this role a bottleneck.
High ownership
Decisiveness
Strong recruiting and talent development capabilities
Accountability
Product judgment
Calm under pressure
Builder mentality
These are the values that guide how we operate:
All In to Win — Operate with urgency, intensity, and a relentless bar for excellence.
A Players Only — Only hire, develop, and keep A players. Protect talent density.
Merchant First — Merchants are why we exist. Every decision measured by merchant impact.
Entrepreneurial Spirit — Move like a Day One company. Fast, scrappy, hungry. Everyone owns.
Execution Over Ego — Best ideas win regardless of source. Status and titles do not matter.
Job details are sourced from the employer's original posting.
Open job postingAbout the company
Phoenix Ecommerce Technologies is a company focused on providing solutions for the e-commerce sector.