Business Systems Developer

Description

Business Systems Developer 

Company Overview 

Salzman Group, Inc. is a multi-entity organization spanning ecommerce, distribution, manufacturing, retail, and roastery operations. Our business depends on a connected ecosystem of ERP, ecommerce, warehouse, CRM, reporting, automation, AI-enabled, and customer-facing systems. Business Systems & Technology is a flexible, cross-functional division responsible for helping those systems, and the people who use them, work better. Our work is often low-visibility but high-impact: reducing operational friction, improving data integrity, connecting systems, building practical tools, and making work across the organization easier and more reliable. 

 Position Overview 

The Business Systems Developer is a full-stack development role responsible for designing, building, integrating, documenting, testing, and supporting technology solutions across Salzman Group. The role shares the broad organizational scope of the Business Systems & Technology Analyst but focuses primarily on systems design, technical implementation, and code authoring. The developer will turn operational needs, business requirements, and project plans into applications, integrations, automations, reporting tools, data processes, and other working solutions. This is not an isolated software-development position. The developer will work directly with business users, project owners, vendors, and technical contributors to understand how the organization operates and why a solution is needed. They should be comfortable entering unfamiliar systems, workflows, and data models, building context quickly, and selecting an approach appropriate to the problem. Some projects will require durable, thoroughly designed systems with formal testing, monitoring, deployment controls, and long-term documentation. Others may be best handled with a prototype, migration utility, one-time script, or intentionally disposable application. Good judgment about the appropriate level of engineering effort is essential. The role normally reports to the Director & Chief Architect of Business Systems & Technology. Depending on the project, day-to-day priorities may also be coordinated through another manager or project owner. Technical standards, architectural alignment, and career management remain within Business Systems & Technology. 

How We Work

Business Systems & Technology operates as a small, responsive team. We maintain plans and long-term goals, but priorities may shift as organizational needs change.

Team members are expected to manage their own work, communicate progress and risk clearly, ask questions early, and collaborate effectively whether working independently, alongside another developer, or within a larger cross-functional team.

We value practical judgment over unnecessary complexity. The right solution may be a resilient production application, an integration, a controlled automation, a one-time utility, a configuration change, or a recommendation not to write code.

We do not expect expertise in every system or technology we use. We do expect curiosity, disciplined learning, professional humility, and the ability to become effective in unfamiliar environments.

Key Responsibilities

Business Discovery & Solution Design

• Work with stakeholders and end users to understand workflows, constraints, data sources, failure modes, and desired outcomes.
• Translate ambiguous needs into technical requirements, implementation plans, system designs, and acceptance criteria.
• Investigate unfamiliar applications, APIs, databases, data models, and architectural environments.
• Identify dependencies and downstream effects before changing shared systems or data flows.
• Communicate tradeoffs involving delivery speed, durability, cost, security, data integrity, technical debt, and maintainability.
• Recognize when a request is better addressed through configuration, process improvement, training, or an existing product instead of custom software.

Full-Stack Development

• Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain internal and customer-facing applications.
• Develop backend services, APIs, integrations, scheduled processes, and data workflows.
• Build practical user interfaces for office, warehouse, retail, and customer environments.
• Extend and integrate existing platforms where appropriate.
• Diagnose defects and production issues across applications, integrations, infrastructure, and data.
• Modernize legacy applications when doing so provides meaningful operational or technical value.

Systems Integration, Automation & Data

• Build integrations among ERP, ecommerce, CRM, warehouse, shipping, support, reporting, marketing, and vendor systems.
• Work with APIs, webhooks, file exchanges, scheduled jobs, and other integration patterns.
• Account for retries, duplicate events, partial failures, rate limits, pagination, and changing third-party data.
• Build automations that reduce manual work while preserving necessary review, visibility, and control.
• Work with relational databases, SQL, structured data, imports, exports, reconciliations, and reporting datasets.
• Establish clear identifiers, sources of truth, validation rules, and safeguards against incomplete, stale, duplicate, or conflicting records.

Commerce & Business Platforms

• Build and maintain Shopify applications, functions, extensions, storefront integrations, and supporting services.
• Support Odoo development, customization, integration, and data workflows.
• Develop or support HubSpot integrations and business processes; comparable Salesforce experience is also relevant.
• Work with product, customer, order, inventory, pricing, purchasing, fulfillment, shipping, service, and financial-adjacent data.
• Understand how technical changes affect operations, customer experience, reporting, accounting processes, and downstream systems.

AI-Assisted Engineering

• Use AI-assisted tools for research, planning, implementation, testing, review, analysis, and documentation.
• Establish sufficient context, requirements, constraints, and acceptance criteria before relying on generated output.
• Review, test, and take professional ownership of AI-generated code, documentation, queries, and recommendations.
• Recognize output that is incomplete, incorrect, insecure, or based on invalid assumptions.
• Build AI-enabled tools where they provide clear and supportable business value.
• Contribute technical perspective to AI governance, tool evaluation, data-control policies, and lifecycle management.
• Favor well-planned and well-validated AI-assisted engineering over unstructured experimentation.

Fit-for-Purpose Engineering

• Match the implementation approach to the project’s risk, urgency, expected lifespan, and business impact.
• Apply appropriate architecture, testing, monitoring, deployment, and documentation standards to durable systems.
• Build lightweight prototypes, diagnostic tools, migration utilities, and one-time scripts when a larger system is not justified.
• Clearly identify temporary code and prevent it from becoming an undocumented production dependency.
• Avoid both overengineering small problems and underengineering systems the organization will rely upon.

Reliability, Testing & Documentation

• Implement testing appropriate to the solution and its level of operational risk.
• Test with representative data, realistic edge cases, failure conditions, and production-like scale where practical.
• Build useful logging, monitoring, diagnostics, error handling, and recovery paths.
• Support deployment, rollback, production troubleshooting, and incident investigation.
• Consider security, permissions, credential handling, dependency risk, and data exposure throughout development.
• Produce design and implementation documentation covering architecture, assumptions, data flows, setup, operation, testing, troubleshooting, and recovery.
• Create user-facing instructions, release notes, and training materials appropriate to the audience.
• Treat documentation and knowledge transfer as part of the completed deliverable.

Collaboration & Self-Management

• Break work into understandable phases, dependencies, risks, and testable deliverables.
• Manage independent work while keeping progress, uncertainty, decisions, and blockers visible.
• Adapt constructively when organizational priorities change.
• Collaborate with the Business Systems & Technology Analyst on requirements, stakeholder communication, testing, documentation, training, and adoption.
• Work effectively with managers, subject-matter experts, vendors, and implementation partners.
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to people with different levels of technical familiarity.
• Join established projects without unnecessarily discarding their existing context, conventions, or architecture.

Examples of Department Work

Recent Business Systems & Technology projects have included:

• ERP migrations, customizations, integrations, testing, and organizational rollout.
• Shopify applications, functions, extensions, and supporting services.
• Reporting and audit tools spanning sales, product, purchasing, shipping, and logistics.
• High-volume data import, normalization, reconciliation, and integrity tooling.
• Warehouse applications connected to scanners and product-dimensioning equipment.
• Integrations among ERP, ecommerce, CRM, support, logistics, and third-party systems.
• Modernization of legacy commerce services and applications.
• AI-assisted analysis, content auditing, documentation, and support tools.
• Hardware-adjacent utilities and specialized operational applications.
• One-time migration and diagnostic tools alongside durable business-critical applications.

Current Technical Environment

Our work most commonly involves:

• Shopify, Odoo, and HubSpot
• JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js
• APIs, webhooks, queues, and scheduled processing
• Git and GitHub-based development workflows
• PostgreSQL, SQL, and application data modeling
• React and related web application frameworks
• Cloud-hosted applications, workers, storage, monitoring, and logging
• NodeJS and Python for automation, data work, integrations, and ERP development
• AI-assisted development and AI-enabled applications

This describes our current environment, not a checklist of mandatory expertise. The tools of today will not necessarily be the tools of tomorrow.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to design, build, test, and maintain software used by other people.
• Practical full-stack development experience.
• Strong working ability with JavaScript or TypeScript and Node.js.
• Experience working with APIs, integrations, relational databases, and SQL.
• Ability to investigate poorly understood problems, systems, and data models.
• Strong debugging, reasoning, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to translate business needs into practical technical solutions.
• Ability to work independently while communicating decisions, progress, risks, and blockers.
• Strong technical and user-facing documentation skills.
• Experience validating solutions through testing, review, and operational evidence.
• Willingness and ability to learn new systems, languages, platforms, and business domains.
• Responsible use of AI-assisted development tools.
• Ability to work primarily on-site in Henrietta, New York. This is not a remote position.

Equivalent practical experience, independent work, open-source contributions, nontraditional education, or a strong portfolio may be considered in place of a specific degree, certification, or conventional career path.

Preferred Qualifications

No candidate is expected to match every item below.

• Shopify or Shopify Plus development experience.
• Experience with Odoo or another extensible ERP.
• Experience with HubSpot, Salesforce, or another CRM platform.
• Experience in ecommerce, retail, distribution, logistics, warehouse operations, manufacturing, or customer-support systems.
• Python experience involving automation, scripting, data processing, integrations, or ERP development.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, queues, workers, or data-intensive applications.
• Experience with scanners, connected devices, desktop applications, or operational hardware.
• Experience building or governing AI-assisted applications and workflows.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems without disrupting business operations.

Key Traits for Success

• Curious enough to understand the business process before choosing a solution.
• Comfortable acknowledging what they do not yet know.
• Pragmatic about the difference between prototypes, disposable utilities, and production systems.
• Thoughtful about data integrity, security, failure modes, maintainability, and user impact.
• Able to work independently without becoming disconnected from the team.
• Respectful of existing project context and conventions.
• Approachable toward users with different levels of technical experience.
• More interested in useful outcomes than in accumulating frameworks or complexity.
• Willing to document decisions, transfer knowledge, and change direction when evidence contradicts an assumption.

What Success Looks Like

A successful Business Systems Developer will increase the department’s ability to turn operational needs into working, supportable technology.

They will build both visible applications and quiet infrastructure: integrations, data processes, internal tools, customer-facing features, and targeted utilities that remove operational obstacles.

Success will not be measured by the number of technologies used or lines of code written. It will be measured by whether the solution is appropriate, understandable, validated, supportable, and genuinely useful. 

Perks of the Position

• Modern office setting
• Competitive health and dental insurance plans
• 401(k) plan with company match after one year
• Vacation time, sick time, and paid holidays
• Fully stocked kitchen and beverages available for employees
• DoorDash DashPass membership
• Employee discounts on espresso machines, coffee, and accessories
• Opportunity for long-term growth within a rapidly expanding company and specialty coffee industry
• Work alongside a passionate, knowledgeable team

Application Materials

Please include a resume and a proper cover letter. Applications submitted without a cover letter will not be considered.

Rather than restating your resume, use the letter to explain what interests you about a broad, business-connected development role and what you believe you would contribute to a small, cross-functional team. We are particularly interested in how you approach unfamiliar problems, continue developing your skills, and balance technical work with the needs of the people who will use or support it.

Applicants will also be asked to answer short questions about technical judgment, learning, collaboration, documentation, and responsible use of AI-assisted development tools. We welcome creative and honest thinking!