Wayfair

Boston, MA | Posted: 5 years ago

Staff Engineer 

Wayfair continues to build and scale out its custom e-commerce delivery network. A critical component of this strategy is transportation operations. The transportation engineering team builds functionality throughout the Wayfair Delivery Network that enables product to flow seamlessly from suppliers to customers. 

The group builds applications and services to compete with customer expectations cultivated by other retailers that include shipping as fast as next day and frictionless merchandise returns. This problem space is particularly complex given the uniquely large packages that comprise a large percentage of Wayfair orders. 

The key motivators of the transportation are to drive down costs, increase delivery speed, and maintain a reliable customer delivery experience. 

The transportation team has worked diligently over the past year to lay the initial foundation for the Wayfair Delivery Network. Over the past few months, initiatives have focused on driving down costs while maintaining delivery reliability. These include: 

• Allow customers to schedule deliveries [to improve delivery reliability]


• Building a better returns process to improve customer experience and drive down costs


• Better manage the movement of freight in the network by being cognizant of promised delivery date/reservations, days to deliver, etc [drives down costs and improves delivery reliability]


• Show users a volumetric time series to increase utilization on our truckloads [lowers transportation costs]


• Uber-like tracking experience on the day of delivery for our WDN Customers ( higher engagement and NPS, leading to more repeat customers )


• Transportation Hackathon blog post: https://tech.wayfair.com/2018/11/first-mile-in-transportation-engineering-with-driveway-app/

What You'll Do

• Actively encourages and participates in debate to form strong opinions weakly held.


• Motivates and influences teams to buy into vision and roadmap, pushing individuals outside of their comfort zones where necessary.


• Drive high impact architectural decisions including inception, design, and delivery.


• Obsessively focus on production readiness for the team including testing, monitoring, deployment, and proactive troubleshooting.


• Identify risks and gaps in product offerings that drive revenue or cost out and lead non-trivial initiatives to address those needs.


• Externally recognized as credible technical and product subject matter expert for broader team's focus area.


• Create proposals and action plans to garner support across the organization.


• Drive implementation and provide visibility to progress through short feedback loops and data-driven action.

What You'll Need

• Proficient in cross-functional consensus building and influencing without authority


• Mastery in designing production systems at scale including fault tolerance, reliability, performance, and security


• Mastery in effective troubleshooting and issue resolution techniques


• Mastery of a modern programming language (preferably PHP)


• Mastery of a modern frontend framework (preferably React)


• Mastery of writing SQL queries against a relational database

About Us Wayfair is one of the world's largest online destinations for the home. Whether you work in our global headquarters in Boston or Berlin, or in our warehouses or offices throughout the world, we're reinventing the way people shop for their homes. Through our commitment to industry-leading technology and creative problem-solving, we are confident that Wayfair will be home to the most rewarding work of your career. If you're looking for rapid growth, constant learning, and dynamic challenges, then you'll find that amazing career opportunities are knocking. No matter who you are, Wayfair is a place you can call home. We're a community of innovators, risk-takers, and trailblazers who celebrate our differences, and know that our unique perspectives make us stronger, smarter, and well-positioned for success. We value and rely on the collective voices of our employees, customers, community, and suppliers to help guide us as we build a better Wayfair - and world - for all. Every voice, every perspective matters. That's why we're proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or genetic information.