Software Engineer, Engine Team

Software Engineer, Engine Team

Engineering – Pleasant Grove, Utah

Position Title: Software Engineer, Engine Team

Status: Full Time (partial remote)

Location: ObservePoint Office – Pleasant Grove, UT 

Department: Engineering 

About ObservePoint
At ObservePoint we have core values that guide us:

INNOVATIVE We continually explore & exploit new ideas

HUMBLE We acknowledge our need to grow individually and collectively

SCRAPPY We deliver great solutions with less

FRIENDS We value our relationships and the time we spend together

As a company we have identified six cultural beliefs each of us need to believe in order to reach our key results. These beliefs are:

CUSTOMER OBSESSED I strive to understand and solve our customer’s problems.

DELIVER PRODUCT I ensure we deliver world-class product.

TAKE ACCOUNTABILITY I continually ask “what else can I do to achieve results?” and I refuse to blame others.

CREATE ALIGNMENT I align my daily work with company priorities in order to move fast.

CHOOSE OPTIMISM I choose optimism and celebrate meaningful achievement wherever I see it.

WIN TOGETHER I deliver results with agility and grit, so WE WIN TOGETHER!

What we do

Our mission is to help users govern their websites. We provide an automated platform that scans millions of web pages every day to perform deep analysis and validation of the world’s highest traffic websites.

Have you ever browsed a website only to find broken links, unexpected trackers, questionable privacy behavior, or slow pages?  At ObservePoint, we make it our business to find these problems and report them to our customers, so they can deliver an excellent web experience for their users.

Who are our customers? Hundreds of the biggest brands in the world: Adobe, Asics, HP Enterprise, Pepsico, Texas Instruments, and US Bank (just to name a few).

ObservePoint Engineering

We are a small team of engineers who love the web. We are fans of continuous deployment, serverless architecture, automation, and modern technologies.

Our product is powered by a distributed system that collects and stores terabytes of data. Our code runs on Docker, powered by AWS ECS and Lambda. Our data is stored in Snowflake and MySQL. We use Redis for caching and SQS for queueing. We have other technologies too, but we are actively moving to the aforementioned technologies.

We believe in resolving technical debt while also building new features. We have a supportive and skilled product team who has deep technical expertise.

At ObservePoint, we invest in our people. Engineers can attend conferences, participate in hackathons, and receive subscriptions to developer tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT.

Hybrid Remote

We work in a hybrid remote and in-person environment. On Wednesdays, we ask engineering team members to work in person and enjoy the provided lunch at our Pleasant Grove office. This arrangement gives us a good blend of in-person collaboration time and deep, uninterrupted work time. We believe both are important for engineering teams to do their best work.

Engine Team

The engine team is responsible for the core technology that crawls websites and does deep web page inspection to collect information from millions of pages every day. This technology consists of services written in TypeScript, Java, and Kotlin which work together to coordinate web scanning. This team also owns the services that scale our engine code up to hundreds of concurrent containers on demand. We ship new code to production most days of the week and believe in automated monitoring. You may have heard about DevOps culture, but at ObservePoint, you’ll live it.

We stay up to date with the latest web technologies so we can implement new features in our engines as the web evolves.

Qualifications

• Computer science degree or equivalent experience. Much of our work requires experience reasoning about scaling, algorithms, distributed systems, and data structures. Given our high volume, the wrong decision can result in very high costs.
• Web platform knowledge. You should be familiar with HTTP, the browser DOM, cookies, and the Chrome network inspector. This is a back-end role, but our engine code scans websites, so the ideal candidate will have some browser-based front-end development experience as well.
• The ability to collaborate with product management and other engineers. Often, this team educates the rest of the company on important web concepts. So we want people who are excited about working with people from a variety of roles, not only fellow engineers.
• Willingness to make commitments and deliver them. We believe in giving engineers the freedom to determine their own schedules, and then holding ourselves accountable to deliver on those commitments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. Half of our team members are located in Europe. Effective written communication is key to spanning time zones. We believe that the best engineering work comes from clear writing.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with TypeScript (on NodeJS) and Java. We prefer to hire people who love learning new languages and technologies. If you have experience with multiple languages, and you want to learn something new, this is a good place to do that.
• 2+ years of experience building distributed systems. AWS experience is a plus, but we care more about your ability to learn new technologies than a list of specific technologies.
• A love of process improvement. If you enjoy helping your teammates be more efficient through automation and building tools, you’ll fit in great here.
• Desire to work in scrum, and open to process changes as we learn and grow together.
• Experience with continuous deployment. We trust our developers to ship code to production every day. You ship it, you own it. We don’t believe in tossing code “over the fence” for someone else to operate.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code. We use Terraform and Cloud Formation, but we love learning from people with other experiences.
• Experience developing code that runs in Docker. Docker is great, but it’s a different paradigm when your code needs to be interruptible and auto-scalable.
• Experience with distributed queueing systems. Distributed queues are the backbone of our architecture. We move millions of messages every day between our many services.
• Experience developing Chrome extensions.