Software Engineer II

Job Description:

Chewy is growing! We’re looking for a Software Engineer II to build and optimize the high-quality Storefront experiences that help millions of pet parents discover, evaluate, and purchase the products and services they need.
As part of Storefront & Experience Engineering, you’ll work at the intersection of customer experience, frontend architecture, page performance, experimentation, accessibility, and operational excellence. You’ll own complex frontend initiatives across high-traffic customer journeys and drive measurable improvements to Core Web Vitals, user-perceived performance, reliability, and engineering velocity.
This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys operating at depth—understanding how the browser, application framework, network, APIs, and delivery infrastructure work together to shape the customer experience. You’ll independently lead technical execution, influence decisions across adjacent teams, mentor other engineers, and own outcomes from design through production.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, test, and operate scalable customer-facing experiences using React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
• Own complex frontend initiatives from technical discovery and architecture through implementation, experimentation, rollout, and production monitoring.
• Drive measurable improvements to Core Web Vitals—including Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift—across critical Storefront journeys.
• Use real-user data, synthetic testing, network waterfalls, browser traces, and application telemetry to identify and prioritize the highest-impact performance opportunities.
• Profile and optimize frontend runtime performance by reducing JavaScript bundle size, main-thread work, unnecessary rendering, render-blocking resources, third-party script impact, and hydration cost.
• Apply modern rendering strategies such as server-side rendering, streaming, code splitting, progressive or selective hydration, caching, and edge delivery to improve initial page load and interaction readiness.
• Diagnose performance issues across the full request path, including the browser, frontend application, content delivery layer, APIs, and downstream dependencies.
• Establish performance budgets, automated checks, dashboards, and regression-detection mechanisms that help teams prevent performance degradation before production.
• Build reusable Storefront patterns and capabilities that improve consistency, experimentation, maintainability, and delivery speed across customer experiences.
• Lead technical design discussions, evaluate tradeoffs, document decisions, and influence architecture across your team and adjacent engineering groups.
• Partner with Product, Design, Accessibility, Analytics, Platform, Mobile, and Backend Engineering to balance customer experience, business outcomes, performance, accessibility, and delivery needs.
• Improve operational excellence through strong testing, observability, staged rollouts, incident response, root-cause analysis, and durable corrective actions.
• Use experimentation and production data to validate that technical improvements translate into meaningful customer and business outcomes.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design reviews, debugging sessions, and technical coaching while helping raise frontend engineering standards across the team.
• Identify ambiguous or systemic problems, develop practical options, surface risks early, and drive solutions to measurable completion.

What You’ll Need

• 3-5+ years of professional experience building and operating modern frontend applications, preferably for high-scale consumer or e-commerce experiences.
• Strong expertise in React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, including modern component architecture, state management, rendering, and composition patterns.
• Demonstrated experience independently leading complex frontend initiatives and delivering measurable improvements to customer experience, performance, reliability, or engineering efficiency.
• Deep understanding of browser behavior, including the critical rendering path, resource loading and prioritization, the JavaScript event loop, layout, paint, compositing, caching, and network behavior.
• Hands-on experience diagnosing performance through Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, WebPageTest, browser performance traces, network waterfalls, and similar profiling tools.
• Experience improving Core Web Vitals and user-perceived performance using both laboratory and real-user measurements.
• Experience with server-side rendering, streaming, hydration strategies, route-level code splitting, lazy loading, and other performance-oriented framework capabilities.
• Strong understanding of JavaScript bundling, tree shaking, dependency management, asset optimization, and strategies for reducing client-side execution cost.
• Experience with real-user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, performance instrumentation, dashboards, alerting, and regression analysis.
• Ability to reason across frontend and backend boundaries, including APIs, content delivery, caching, third-party integrations, and downstream dependencies.
• Experience designing scalable and maintainable frontend architectures that support continued product development without sacrificing performance or reliability.
• Strong testing and production-readiness practices, including unit, integration, end-to-end, performance, and accessibility testing.
• Ability to independently define, decompose, and solve ambiguous technical problems while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term maintainability.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, performance findings, risks, and recommendations to technical and nontechnical partners.
• Experience mentoring engineers, improving team practices, and influencing technical decisions beyond individual feature implementation.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus

• Experience with Next.js, React Server Components, Server Actions, streaming, partial rendering, or edge-rendered applications.
• Experience optimizing high-traffic e-commerce journeys such as Homepage, navigation, search, product listing, product detail, cart, checkout, or customer account experiences.
• Experience building hybrid mobile experiences or optimizing web applications embedded within native applications or WebViews.
• Experience with CDN configuration, edge caching, browser caching, image optimization, font loading, resource hints, and content delivery strategies.
• Experience governing or optimizing third-party scripts, marketing pixels, tag managers, analytics libraries, and other externally loaded resources.
• Experience with microfrontend architectures, shared frontend platforms, monorepos, package publishing, or reusable application foundations.
• Experience with Node.js, backend-for-frontend services, GraphQL, or frontend-facing API orchestration.
• Experience defining performance budgets and integrating automated performance validation into CI/CD workflows.
• Experience connecting performance improvements to experimentation results, customer engagement, conversion, or other business outcomes.
• Strong understanding of web accessibility, including semantic HTML, keyboard interaction, focus management, ARIA, screen readers, and WCAG standards.
• Experience with observability standards such as OpenTelemetry and enterprise monitoring platforms.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate investigation, implementation, testing, documentation, or operational support.
• The specific salary offered to a candidate may be influenced by a variety of factors including but not limited to the candidate’s relevant experience, education, and work location. In addition, this position is eligible for 401k and a new hire and annual equity grant. C08+ positions may also be eligible for annual bonus.

We offer different types of insurance and benefits, such as medical/Rx, vision, dental, life, disability, hospital indemnity, critical illness, and accident. We offer parental leave, family services benefits, backup dependent care, flexible spending accounts, telemedicine, pet adoption reimbursement, employee assistance program, and many discounts including 10% off pet insurance and 20% off at Chewy.com.

Exempt salary team members have unlimited PTO, subject to manager approval. Team members will receive six paid holidays per year. Team members may be eligible for paid sick and family leave in compliance with applicable state and local regulations.

Chewy is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, gender, citizenship, marital status, religion, age, disability, gender identity, results of genetic testing, veteran status, as well as any other legally-protected characteristic. If you have a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act or similar law, and you need an accommodation during the application process or to perform these job requirements, or if you need a religious accommodation, please contact CAAR@chewy.com.

To access Chewy's California CPRA Job Applicant Privacy Policy, please click here.