Staff Engineer, Backend (Engineering Enablement League)
SpotHero is looking for a Staff Engineer Backend to own systems across our engineering department that drive business objectives. 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.
This individual will work with the Product Management team to ensure requirements are defined correctly and have the ability to successfully architect complex systems and collaborate with more junior engineers to ensure proper implementation of design. You will be an educator who can take the complex and explain it in terms that all audiences understand. Your greatest work will be through others, as you help people level up their technical systems.
This role will be part of the Engineering Enablement League and will join the Platform Engineering Squad.
The focus of this league is to support and raise the quality of the work of all engineers in our Leagues and Squads and fellow SpotHero employees across all departments. Whether it be scalability, tooling, automation or security, the Engineering Enablement League (EEL) is focused on making it easier for other engineers to add functionally to their platforms. EEL also owns our Search functionality and provides our SpotHero API to our partners.
Sound like you? We can't wait to meet you!
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.
- Train engineers to work with new architecture.
- 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 Java / Python / Django.
- Multiple other backend programming languages i.e. GoLang and Kotlin.
- 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 and can implement them within the services you are developing on.
- Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills.
Don't check all of the boxes? Please still apply! We love getting to know others and how we can help you grow at SpotHero.
Technology we use:
Our Android Stack is: Kotlin and XML (standard for Android apps) using MVI architecture (still working on refactoring old views), our database layer is built in Realm. Bitrise for CI/CD. We also make heavy use of Dagger, RxJava, Espresso (testing). Network stack uses Retrofit.
Our iOS Stack is: Swift using MVC architecture, CoreData for Local Storage, XCUI for UI Testing, XCTest for Unit testing, SPM for Package Management, Fastlane for app automation and build scripts, Bitrise for CI/CD, and Sentry for crash reporting.
Our Back End Stack is: Monolith using Java/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.
- Our award-winning culture has received recognition from Built In’s 2021 Moxie Awards, as a 2021 Best Places to Work in Chicago, Top Company Culture by Entrepreneur, 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.