Senior Software Engineer - Backend Foundations Team

At Octopus Deploy, we believe in the importance of rest, recharge, and balance. Every year, our team takes a well-earned break during our company-wide shutdown at the end of December. This reflects our core values of supporting our team members and fostering a culture of well-being.

Our hiring process is also part of this commitment to thoughtful engagement. If you’ve applied to a role or are considering applying to a role during this time, we want you to know we'll be back on January 2, 2025, and will review all applications promptly upon our return.

Thank you for considering Octopus Deploy as the next step in your journey. We look forward to connecting with you in the new year!

Octopus Deploy sets the standard for Continuous Delivery, empowering software teams to deliver value in an agile way. Over 4,000 organizations globally – including Ubisoft, ASOS, Xero, monday.com, Stack Overflow, NASA, and Disney – rely on our Continuous Delivery, GitOps, and release orchestration solutions. 

Founded in Australia in 2012, our team of over 300 Octonauts now spans the globe. We combine high growth and big ambitions with a sustainable, balanced working environment. Our revenue has grown consistently between 30–50% every year for the past 8 years, and we’ve been profitable for 10 out of the past 11 years.

We’ve been remote-first since 2015 and work with an uncommon level of transparency. You can read our public handbook to learn how we work. We have a transparent approach to compensation that ensures people doing the same work with the same skill get paid the same, with well-defined career pathways. We foster a supportive, collaborative, and high-trust environment. We leave our job titles at the door and focus on doing what’s best for our customers and team. Our leaders never shy away from answering the tough questions at our all-hands calls or in 1:1s. We conduct interviews and onboarding virtually as part of being a remote-first company.

Elevate Octopus Server with Your Expertise!

This role is part of the Backend Foundations Team, which develops the building blocks of Octopus Server. Our customers are other internal teams that develop against Octopus Server, who choose to rely on these building blocks for simple, reliable and performant foundations.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with experience in developing strong foundations that support software teams. Our current roadmap is focused on several areas including: improving observability with trace telemetry (OpenTelemetry); consolidating our work abstractions; tightening feedback loops for engineers (improving build times); further exploring the modularity of our monolithic architecture and supporting patterns and guidance, so teams fall into the pit of success easily.

If you are excited by challenges like improving testing techniques and tightening feedback loops, we want you on our team!

You will be a great fit for this role if:

• You have a firm grasp of the software trade using C#.
• You are comfortable making good decisions with general concepts like dependency, extensibility, and compatibility, and perhaps you are a specialist in a specific area of software engineering.
• You enjoy automating builds, tests, deployments, infrastructure, and operational tasks.
• You enjoy working in a "you built it, you run it" culture, where teams take pride in the quality of their work and the availability of their systems, with many people joining our humane on-call program.
• You can work independently, motivating yourself to do high-quality work on time and communicating with your teammates when you need help or are ready for something new.
• You enjoy collaborating with other people to solve problems, challenging each other to discover the best solution for a problem using a balance of passion, pragmatism, and empathy.
• You are a results-oriented person, focused on iteratively delivering valuable things to your customers, willingly changing direction based on clear and transparent business information, and someone who helps others do the same.

You'll Enjoy This Role If:

• You like a balance of freedom and responsibility, being treated as an adult.
• You want to do the best work of your life with other like-minded people.
• You enthusiastically accept radically candid feedback; that is thoughtful, timely, and directly actionable, and you offer the same benefit to others.
• You enjoy solving complex distributed computing, automation, security, performance, and usability problems.
• You like working with great tools like the latest versions of C#, .NET, TypeScript, and React, in the development environment of your choice.
• You like working with customers directly, helping them succeed with Octopus, even if success is elusive.
• You enjoy doing things the right way from the very beginning knowing you are working on a valuable asset.

A typical day might include:

• Working where you work best, in a home office designed by you, using a device of your choosing, with or without music, in an atmosphere you create for yourself.
• Changing source code hosted in GitHub, most of it in the open, collaborating on a pull request, then shipping a release to customers worldwide via an automated build, test, and delivery pipeline, often within the same day.
• Handling an inbound support ticket from a customer, helping them succeed with Octopus, or offering advice to a customer in our community Slack workspace.
• Pairing with another software engineer or a support engineer to help them reproduce a tricky problem, helping them understand the inner workings of Octopus in the process so they can be more helpful to even more customers over time.
• Pairing with another engineer on a Zoom call to solve a complex technical problem or design a new feature.
• Fixing a bug using an approach like red-green-refactor to prevent customers from experiencing that bug again.
• Improving our documentation to help customers discover solutions for themselves and learn how to use Octopus for more complicated workflows.
• Writing a blog post about something interesting for other developers or explaining a new feature of Octopus.

Compensation:

Octopus has an internally open and transparent system for compensation. Any Octonaut can view the compensation for any role at any level. This ensures people doing the same work with the same skill get paid the same. 

The compensation for this role is:

Level 3 (Senior): Maturing: $145k AUD / $155k NZD, Performing: $165k AUD / $175k NZD

Benefits include a minimum of 25 days annual leave, up to 10 days of paid sick and carers leave, 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave with flexible return options, and stock options. Learn more.

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role. We know interviewing can seem daunting, but rest assured we designed our interview process to move quickly while still getting you all the information you need.

👋🏼Initial chat

[30 min] Talent acquisition screen: Meet with your Talent Acquisition team and get a feel for what it would be like to be an Octonaut!

💻Take-Home Challenge

[2-4 hours] Technical assessment: Complete a bespoke technical challenge at your own pace. This is evaluated by two Software Engineers to determine if we progress to the Live Code interview

🧑‍💻Live Code Interview

[75 min] Live Code Interview: Discuss your solution with two of our Software Engineers. Pair program to extend your solution in the final 15 minutes.

Our public employee handbook is the best place to learn more about life at Octopus. It includes our values, how we structure teams, career progression, leave and benefits, and much more. 

If you're enthusiastic about this position, even if you don’t meet all the criteria above, we wholeheartedly encourage you to submit your application. Our talent team is in-house, and we recognize that every individual brings something unique. We take the time to review every application and consider how you might add to the team. 

We know your time is precious. If you apply, we promise to update you at least once per week about the status of your application and to give you clear expectations for each step in the journey. 

Important Notice About Recruitment Scams

Please be aware that individuals and organizations may attempt to scam job seekers by offering fraudulent employment opportunities under the name of Octopus Deploy or Codefresh by Octopus Deploy. These scams may involve fake job postings, unsolicited emails, text messages, or other communications claiming to be from our recruiters or hiring managers.

Octopus Deploy will never:

• Ask for sensitive personal information, such as credit card details, bank account numbers, or other financial information during the recruitment process.

• Request payment, fees, or purchases from job seekers.

• Send checks for equipment purchases prior to employment.

Official Communication Channels:

All communication from Octopus Deploy recruiters or hiring managers will come from official email addresses ending in @octopus.com. If you receive messages from other domains (e.g., name.sr.octopus.com or generic addresses like @yahoo.com), these are not from Octopus Deploy.

If you are unsure about the authenticity of a communication claiming to be from Octopus Deploy, do not provide any personal or financial information and contact us immediately at [email protected].

Reporting Fraud

If you believe you have been a victim of a recruitment scam, please report it to the appropriate authorities:

United States: Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Europe: European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF)

New Zealand:  NetSafe

Australia: Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC)

Signs of a Recruitment Scam

Be vigilant about the following red flags:

• The sender uses email domains that do not end in @octopus.com (e.g., name.sr.octopus.com or generic addresses like @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com).

• Poor spelling and grammar in emails or official-looking documents.

• Requests for payment, financial details, or fees to proceed in the hiring process.

• Receiving a check and being asked to deposit it for equipment purchases before employment.

• Contacting you through informal channels such as WhatsApp, particularly in the United States.

• Pressure to act quickly or threats of losing the opportunity if immediate action is not taken.

We take fraudulent activities seriously and are committed to ensuring the integrity of our hiring process. Thank you for helping us protect our community and future Octonauts!

[Note to Search Firms/Agencies]

Octopus Deploy does not compensate search firms for unsolicited assistance unless they have a written search agreement with Octopus Deploy and the requisition is position-specific. Any resumes, curriculum vitae and other unsolicited assistance from search firms that do not have a written search agreement or position-specific requisition submitted to any Associate of Octopus Deploy will be deemed the sole property of Octopus Deploy and no fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Octopus Deploy.