Senior Python Developer

Who Are We?

The Motley Fool is a purpose-driven financial services company on a mission to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. For 30 years, we’ve been helping people make better investment decisions through transparency, education, and a healthy dose of Foolish fun. We’re a fast-moving, collaborative team that values high-quality work, curiosity, and initiative. We care deeply about what we do, and we’re driven by the impact our work has on real people’s financial futures.

What Does This Team Do?

Our Commerce and Messaging (Customer Engagement) tech team is at the epicenter of The Motley Fool’s subscription business. All revenue transactions, subscription-related events, and marketing, product, and retention communications flow through the systems that this team manages. We have recently modernized our commerce stack to Python, FastAPI, and Stripe, and we are currently migrating our remaining messaging stack from legacy .NET to modern Python, while streamlining our Braze setup.

What Will You Do in This Role?

The Python Developer plays a critical role in driving our commerce and communication infrastructure forward. You will collaborate closely with other developers, product owners, and business stakeholders to design, build, and optimize critical transactional and messaging pipelines that support our global membership base.

Okay, but what will you actually do in this role?

• Develop new features for our core commerce and customer engagement platforms.
• Work directly with stakeholders to iterate and get rapid feedback on feature development.
• Appropriately use AI tools like Claude Code and multi-agent workflows on a daily basis to assist with planning and implementation.
• Ensure our critical transactional and event systems have high availability, durability, accuracy (since money is on the line), and remain highly performant.
• Build and enhance admin tooling and workflows that enable our internal business stakeholders to be more self-sufficient.
• Ensure features meet acceptance criteria and are supported by robust automated test coverage.
• Integrate with third-party providers and tools (such as Stripe and Braze)—leveraging their existing functionality and working around their limitations.
• Investigate, troubleshoot, and fix reported bugs and Sentry errors.
• Collaborate with the Product Owner and Project Manager to break down business requirements into clear technical stories and tasks.
• Partner with multiple in-house engineering squads and external providers to launch customer-facing solutions.
• Review peer code and participate in our team’s on-call rotation to maintain system reliability.
• Support and scale platforms across multiple countries.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You:

• Are deeply curious, love to learn, and enjoy solving complex architectural migration problems (like moving legacy services from .NET to Python).
• Value high-performance, cross-functional collaboration and enjoy working closely with stakeholders in a consultative manner.
• Have a keen eye for system accuracy and durability—knowing that millions of revenue-generating transactions depend on your work.
• Welcome modern development practices, including integrating advanced AI engineering workflows into your daily routine to scale your impact.
• Take proactive ownership of system health, testing, telemetry, and error monitoring.

Required Experience and Skills:

• 5+ years of experience building, delivering, enhancing, and maintaining APIs consumed by multiple systems using Python and a Python-based API framework like FastAPI.
• Experience building scalable, high-performance backends served to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.
• Hands-on experience with Stripe billing and payment infrastructure.
• Strong experience with asynchronous data retrieval and processing in Python.
• Experience with Docker, containerization, and modern automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Proficiency in system monitoring, telemetry, and debugging production performance issues.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and translation skills (turning business goals into reliable technical execution).
• Ability to work US East Coast core hours (spanning the 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM EST timeframe).
• Nice-to-Have/Pluses: Experience with Braze (or similar customer engagement platforms), RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Redis, legacy .NET/C# migration, or frontend technologies like Next.js, React, Tailwind, and TypeScript.