Senior Software Engineer 1

Senior Software Engineer 1

New York, New York, United States

Who We Are

The Farmer's Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We're starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers' doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future. To date, The Farmer's Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You'll Come In

At The Farmer's Dog, we believe the best customer experience comes from owning the technology that powers it. That's why we design, build, and operate our systems in-house, from subscription and e-commerce to fulfillment and delivery, so that every dog and human gets the right experience, every time.

Our engineers work on problems that matter and that are hard: evolving systems to support rapid growth, building platforms flexible enough to serve customers with many different needs, and creating product experiences that didn't exist before.

Short feedback loops are how we get better, in code and in how we work together. We trust people to do good work and want to keep improving, so feedback flows freely. The same instinct shapes how we ship: peer-reviewed code to production in minutes via CI/CD, and A/B experiments, feature flags, shadow deployments and progressive rollouts to release with confidence.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll work on the systems at the core of how The Farmer's Dog operates and ensure our systems support our next phase of growth. You'll own architectural decisions that other engineers will build on for years, partnering closely with other engineering pods, Product, Design, Data Analytics, and Lifecycle Comms.

We care deeply about building reliable, scalable systems and about working well together, regularly whiteboarding, pair programming, and reviewing architecture with peers who set a high bar. If you want to make an outsized impact on technology, on customers, and on the lives of dogs everywhere, this is the right place for you.

One Team: We don't think of ourselves as "Acquisition Marketers", "Engineers", "Data Analysts", or "Product Managers". Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don't think departments matter. We'd rather align ourselves to the goals we're working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing: Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren't tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there's a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions: We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is. We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention. We answer questions and address problems early and proactively. We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don't subscribe to "best practices" or "industry KPIs". We're uninterested in how we compare to "benchmarks"; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don't subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption: We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, "what's the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?". We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don't expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Lead the end-to-end lifecycle of complex systems and features, from design through long-term operation. You own what you ship in production, not just the merge.
• Decompose ambiguous problems into concrete work. Take a customer problem or vague initiative, break it into shippable scope, make judgment calls you can defend and document, then ship the code that delivers against them.
• Understand data relationships and how they propagate through the system. Engineers here own the data model end-to-end, from API to database, designing the schemas, migrations, and contracts that hold up as we iterate. Be thoughtful with decisions that help us iterate and hold up as we scale.
• Own production operation and monitoring of the systems you build, with awareness of their SLAs. Diagnose root causes and anticipate risk before it becomes an incident. Surface issues with recommendations, not open questions.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data Analytics, Lifecycle Comms, and others as the work demands. Bring them in from the start and solve problems together, not in isolation. Write and speak clearly enough that they can engage with your decisions, not just receive them.
• Develop the pod and improve the system. Mentor other Engineers through code review, design feedback, and incident retros. Refine the processes, tools, and on-call practices that raise the bar for everyone.
• Work in our stack: TypeScript end-to-end, GraphQL, Temporal for durable workflows, Postgres, AWS. Embrace and evaluate new tools as the work requires.
• Leverage AI tools to make your work better than it would be without them. Own what you ship: you must be able to explain, debug, and maintain it, regardless of how it was produced.

We're Excited About You Because

• You are a strong full stack engineer with 6 - 8+ years of experience who is comfortable working across the frontend and backend, and you enjoy building features end-to-end (experience in our stack is a plus).
• You have significant experience building and operating production systems where bugs cost money or break customer trust.
• You bring strong written and verbal communication, and you see the value in writing down key decisions, tradeoffs, and practices for the people who'll use them.
• You welcome diverse opinions and actively seek input to challenge your assumptions.
• You're an owner, have excellent problem-solving skills and can prioritize tasks effectively, with a strong attention to detail.
• You bring pragmatic judgment about when to reach for AI and other new tools and when not to.
• You are able to thrive in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment, naturally curious and proactive self-starter, constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and solutions.
• You love dogs.

Office Guidelines

We are an in-office culture, made of in-office people who thrive on the collaboration and magnetism of working in a shared space. We are seeking individuals who excel in this type of environment, where being present fosters deeper connections and engagement. We ask all team members to be in office 4 - 5 days a week to build a collaborative and invested environment to foster our unique in-person culture we are proud to have. This office policy is subject to change at company discretion.

Our Belonging Philosophy

At TFD, we believe Belonging is a shared commitment to creating a workplace where every person feels respected, valued, and empowered to be themselves. When people feel a true sense of belonging, they do their best work, take smart risks, and bring forward diverse perspectives — leading to stronger decisions and deeper relationships. We anchor this belief in a simple phrase: "Everyone's welcome at the dog park." No matter your background, identity, or role, there's space for you here. There's no one way to show up at the dog park—