Staff Engineer, Backend (Drivers League)
SpotHero is looking for Staff Backend Engineers to join the Drivers League - we build products for all of SpotHero’s Drivers!
The Drivers League at SpotHero is responsible for all aspects of the driver's experience. This league is responsible for building Heroic experiences on both the web (desktop and mobile) and native mobile apps (Android & iOS). We don’t stop there, we also strive to create a painless experience while parking at garages. This League cares about quality and SpotHero’s value of #GiveDriversTheRightOfWay, which means to us that we take the Hero in our name seriously, and we go the extra mile to make sure our drivers have an experience we're proud of.
You will have over twelve years of engineering experience, worked for multiple companies as a software engineer, and have become an Expert or a Polymath in Software Engineering in Python/Django.
You have strong coding skills and strong system design/architecture capabilities with multiple examples of successful projects that you have worked on and a couple of failed projects that taught you not to build a “perfect” ivory tower that no one wants to use.
You will collaborate with management on vision setting, technology direction, architecture, and best practices. The Staff Engineer will contribute to the codebase following set standards and successfully completing stories and have the ability to provide support for any part of the codebase; also able to understand the codebase with minimal direction from others. You will have ownership of code standards, unit and integration testing practices, and technical roadmap. You are a technical educator, not a technical dictator. You will collaborate with Agile Facilitators to help define the Definition of Ready / Done, support the team’s norms, and be an active member at squad ceremonies.
You will work with the Product Management team to ensure requirements are defined correctly. You have the ability to successfully architect complex systems and collaborate with more junior engineers to ensure proper implementation of the design. You will be an educator who can take the complex and explain it in terms that all audiences can understand. Your greatest work will be through others, as you help people level up their technical systems.
Who we are:
At SpotHero, we work as a team to empower people to get everywhere, easier! We’re rapidly growing with the mission of bringing the parking industry into the future through technology. Drivers across the nation use SpotHero’s mobile app and website to reserve convenient, affordable parking in advance, on the go, or through their connected cars. Parking companies rely on us to help them reach new customers while optimizing their business. We connect the dots with cutting-edge technology, delivering value to both sides of this exciting, evolving marketplace.
What will you do:
- Identify, design, develop, test, and release high quality functionality as efficiently as possible.
- You will be an educator, a mentor and coach. People will come to you for advice because you are approachable and you are able to convey your points in a language that they understand.
- Build and maintain tools and services related to product/engineering squad’s goals.
- Work collaboratively with the rest of the team to deliver quality products with a focus on speed, security, and analytics.
- Independently identify areas for improvement and innovation within the squad ecosystem, and lead the charge on making those changes.
- Be a key hands-on contributor to the design and implementation of new products and features through the entire stack.
- Ownership of codebase, maintaining it and ensuring it runs consistently.
- Collaborate with all senior and staff level engineers to explore options and help define architecture and design across the engineering organization.
- Ability to move between squads to devise architecture and assist projects in moving forward.
- Educate Software Engineers to work with Distributed architecture and System Design across systems.
- Function as a leader within the engineering department, providing mentoring and training to all levels of engineering team members.
- Function as internal expert for technology speciality and educate the team on new and changing technologies.
- Be an industry thought leader, participating in public speaking events and meetups to showcase SpotHero as a leader in technology.
- Secure and safeguard data to preserve its integrity, reliability, and availability and ensure appropriate access levels are maintained.
The following experience is relevant to us:
- We value humility, a strong work ethic, flexibility, collaboration, technical curiosity, and constant learning.
- 12+ years experience as an engineer across multiple environments.
- You are comfortable in considering the right Architecture for the right job, as opposed to forcing one approach on all problems.
- Knowledgeable of object-oriented and/or functional programming patterns and paradigms.
- Production Experience and strong skills with Python/Django/Postgres.
- Ability to work in all areas of the tech stack, including infrastructure through the application layer to client libraries.
- Ability to provide support for any pieces of codebase owned and also understand the codebase with minimal direction from peers or more senior engineers.
- Proven ability to work on implementation independently.
- Strong experience working with relational databases like Postgres and mySQL.
- Knowledge of various API paradigms such as REST and RPC/gRPC and can implement them within the services you are developing on.
- Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills.
Technology we use:
- Our Back End Stack is: Monolith using Django/Python/PostgreSQL. We are moving our Monolith to a Modular Monolith, using Domain Driven Design. When relevant we extract specific domains to Services currently using Java, Kotlin and GoLang. We also use Docker, deploy our apps via Kubernetes. We use Kafka for asynchronous-, and gRPC for synchronous service-to-service communication.
Our Front End Stack is: Our Front End stack is React/Redux, Sass, Jest/React Testing Library/Cypress, and Webpack. We maintain a private npm repository with shareable UI components, utility functions, Babel/ESLint/Prettier configurations, and custom tasks.
Our Data Stack is: Our Monolith Database is Postgres and Redis for caching. We also use Redshift as our data warehouse and S3 as our data lake. The data lake is queried using Presto. We use Airflow and Spark for ETL, as well as do some stream processing (Kafka Streams and Spark at the moment). Our Model pipeline uses scikit-learn, pandas. Our analysts utilize Looker as our Business Intelligence tool. And we use Quicksight for Dashboard on our external Data Products.
Our Dev Tools Stack is: AWS+Kubernetes for hosting. Terraform + Helm Charts for IaaS/Deployment. ConcourseCI for CI/CD. Prometheus/Alertmanager/VictorOps for team alerting. We’re starting to work on multi-region available services.
What we are offering:
- Career game changer – A truly unique experience to work for a fast-growing startup in a role with unlimited potential for growth.
- Excellent benefits –
- In the US we cover up to 95% of Medical Premiums, 50% of Dental & Vision Premiums, company sponsored Life Insurance, and generous parental leave.
- In Canada we offer Medical (prescription drug and paramedical coverage), Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, STD and LTD.
- Flexible PTO policy and great work/life balance – We value and support each individual team member.
- Annual parking stipend – we help people park!
- The opportunity to collaborate with fun, innovative, and passionate people in a casual, yet highly productive atmosphere.
- A workplace recognized as the Best Consumer Web Company by Built in Chicago, Top Company Culture by Entrepreneur, a Top Workplace by Chicago Tribune, and one of Chicago’s Best Places to Work for Women Under 35 by Crain’s Chicago Business.
Steps to apply: Please include any GitHub account, LinkedIn profile, and any project that you’re particularly proud of. We love seeing work that others loved working on.
At SpotHero, we Respect Fellow Drivers by providing an inclusive interview experience for everyone, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process. Please let our team know of your need when you apply or as you begin interviewing with our team.
SpotHero is an equal opportunity employer. We know that a diverse workforce is the strongest workforce, and are committed to building and supporting an inclusive environment for all.