About Extend:
Extend is revolutionizing the post-purchase experience for retailers and their customers by providing merchants with AI-driven solutions that enhance customer satisfaction and drive revenue growth. Our comprehensive platform offers automated customer service handling, seamless returns/exchange management, end-to-end automated fulfillment, and product protection and shipping protection alongside Extend's best-in-class fraud detection. By integrating leading-edge technology with exceptional customer service, Extend empowers businesses to build trust and loyalty among consumers while reducing costs and increasing profits.Today, Extend works with more than 1,000 leading merchant partners across industries, including fashion/apparel, cosmetics, furniture, jewelry, consumer electronics, auto parts, sports and fitness, and much more. Extend is backed by some of the most prominent technology investors in the industry, and our headquarters is in downtown San Francisco.
What You'll Do:
- People Development & Mentorship: Actively coach and mentor a team of engineers, fostering their career growth through personalized development plans, regular 1:1s, and actionable feedback loops.
- Technical Excellence & Oversight: Provide technical guidance and architectural oversight for event-driven, service-oriented systems that power claim servicing, refunds, exchanges and reverse logistics, ensuring the team builds scalable, maintainable, and high-quality software.
- Product Partnership: Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Operations leaders to define the roadmap for claim servicing and fulfillment, translate business requirements into technical specifications, and ensure the team is creating the right value and solving the right problems related to post-purchase customer experiences.
- Delivery & Execution: Own the end-to-end delivery of complex features and projects utilizing Agile methodologies and an AI-native SDLC to maintain a predictable shipping cadence while balancing speed, quality, and operational impact.
- Culture: Cultivate a high-trust, collaborative environment where engineers are empowered to take risks, share ideas, and drive outcomes, with a strong sense of ownership over the reliability and usability of our post-purchase flows.
- AI Adoption & Innovation: Drive the strategic adoption of AI across the team by championing an AI-native SDLC while also partnering with product teams to define and deliver AI-native product capabilities.
- Operational Excellence: Drive the team’s operational standards—including on-call rotations, incident response, monitoring, alerting, and automated testing—to ensure the reliability, performance, and correctness of claim fulfillment flows.
- Process Optimization: Continuously evaluate and improve engineering workflows (e.g., planning, solution design, CI/CD pipelines, code review processes, sprint planning) to remove bottlenecks, increase developer velocity, and ensure quality.
- Stakeholder Communication: Serve as the primary point of communication for the team, effectively managing expectations with leadership and cross-functional partners regarding timelines, tradeoffs, risks, and capacity allocation.
What We Are Looking For:
- 10+ years of experience in software development, including building and operating production systems in high-volume transactional domains (e.g., e‑commerce, payments, logistics, insurance, or post‑purchase/claims flows).
- 3+ years of experience as an Engineering Leader (Manager, Director, or equivalent) directly managing engineers and owning delivery for a team or product area.
- Deep understanding of service‑oriented and microservice architectures, with practical experience designing event‑driven systems that prioritize reliability, observability, and data integrity across distributed services.
- Experience with cloud-native and serverless architectures and infrastructure as code, ideally on AWS (e.g., Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kafka, CDK or similar).
- Demonstrated ability to partner with Product, Design, and Operations to define roadmaps and ship impactful features in complex business domains.
- Proven track record of building, growing, and leading high-performing engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, and mentoring across experience levels.
- Experience leveraging AI/LLM-based tools within engineering teams, and an aptitude for applying AI thoughtfully to operational and customer-facing workflows.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with stakeholders in Operations, Merchant Success, Risk/Fraud, to balance customer experience, operational efficiency, and financial outcomes.
- Highly developed interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to translate between technical and non-technical audiences, clearly articulate tradeoffs, and build consensus.
- Experience fostering a culture of quality and operational excellence (testing strategy, CI/CD, on-call, incident management, SLOs) in systems that handle money movement, shipping, or customer entitlements.
- Proactive leadership style: comfortable navigating ambiguity, identifying new opportunities, and driving initiatives from concept through execution.
- Ability to lead and support engineers working remotely across multiple locations and time zones.
Expected Pay Range: $166,500-$193,500 per year salaried*
* The target base salary range for this position is listed above. Individual salaries are determined based on a number of factors including, but not limited to, job-related knowledge, skills and experience.
Life at Extend:
- Working with a great team from diverse backgrounds in a collaborative and supportive environment.
- Competitive salary based on experience, with full medical and dental & vision benefits.
- Stock in an early-stage startup growing quickly.
- Generous, flexible paid time off policy.
- 401(k) with Financial Guidance from Morgan Stanley.