Sr. Software Engineer (back-end)

As a at Pollfish, a Prodege company, you will play a pivotal role in driving the technical vision and strategic direction of our company's market research platform. Your extensive experience and leadership will be crucial in architecting, developing, and optimizing our backend infrastructure to ensure scalability, robustness, and performance. You will lead complex projects, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to deliver innovative solutions that meet our clients' evolving needs. Your contributions will directly influence the company's ability to provide cutting-edge market research tools that enable smarter business decisions and maintain our competitive edge in the industry.

Pollfish, a Prodege, LLC company, is an online market research survey platform where data driven brands bring market research in-house for faster and smarter decision making. We have a proprietary network of 250M consumers/year which enables companies to connect with and understand real consumers worldwide in a fast, easy and cost-effective way.

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable and reliable backend services for our market research platform
• Collaborate with product managers and other engineers to translate product requirements into technical specifications
• Architect and optimize our backend infrastructure leveraging technologies like Scala, Play, Kafka, Postgres, Druid, Spark, Flink, Redis, and EhCache
• Drive strategic technical initiatives that enhance the scalability and performance of our market research platform.
• Lead efforts to innovate and optimize our backend infrastructure, ensuring it meets current and future business needs.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement within the engineering team.
• Ensure alignment of engineering projects with business goals through effective collaboration with cross-functional teams.

(typical monthly, weekly, daily tasks which support the primary objectives)

• Collaborate with product managers to understand and translate product requirements into technical specifications
• Architect and implement backend solutions for new features and enhancements to the market research platform
• Develop, maintain, and scale backend services to handle increasing data volumes and user traffic
• Implement and optimize complex database queries for performance and efficiency
• Write and review clean, well-documented, and testable code adhering to best practices
• Conduct thorough testing to ensure the quality and reliability of our backend systems
• Integrate with third-party APIs and services, ensuring seamless integration and operation
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and proactively improve backend systems to identify and resolve issues promptly
• Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in backend development
• Mentor and guide junior engineers to enhance their skills and knowledge

• Successful execution of backend development projects on time and within budget
• Implementation of scalable and reliable backend systems that meet the needs of our users
• Continuous improvement of the market research platform's backend infrastructure
• Delivery of high-quality code that adheres to best practices and is maintainable
• Effective collaboration with cross-functional teams to ensure product success
• Proactive identification and resolution of backend issues to maintain system uptime

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
• 5+ years of experience in backend development with a strong focus on Scala/Java/Kotlin or Python/Ruby/Go
• Proven experience with MVC web frameworks (Play, Spring, Web MVC, etc.) and RESTful APIs
• Expertise in technologies like Redis, EhCache, ORMs (e.g., Hibernate)
• Solid understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• Familiarity with NoSQL databases like ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Druid, etc.
• Strong experience with End-to-End and Unit Testing
• Proven expertise in backend development with strong experience in Scala, Java, Kotlin, or Python
• Experience with MVC web frameworks and RESTful APIs
• Familiarity with relational and NoSQL databases
• Proficiency in End-to-End and Unit Testing
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced and collaborative environment

• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-based infrastructure
• Knowledge of machine learning or artificial intelligence concepts
• Experience with streaming data technologies like Kafka or Kinesis
• Exposure to distributed systems and microservice architecture
• Experience with DevOps practices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)

• An attractive salary package
• Part of an innovative tech company
• Private Health Insurance
• Company Equity
• Weekly Office Events - Catered Lunch and Breakfast
• Stocked Kitchen
• Company Outings & Quarterly Events
• Hybrid Working
• Meal Coupons - Monthly
• LinkedIn Learning & Training Opportunities/Budget
• Mental Health Benefits - Wellness Coach App Subscription
• Great office location in the city center - Parking slots available
• Gym Subscription - UP Fit
• Quarterly Charitable Giving Allowance
• Peer recognition Allowance

Pollfish lives in the Cloud, and is deployed several times a day using Kubernetes. A reactive microservice architecture underpins the entire platform. The core application is written in Play (Scala), while the vast majority of the supporting services are using the proven Twitter stack, Finatra/Finagle as well as the Lightbend Akka stack.

All new front end projects are using a React/Redux/Sagas stack, while there is also an old JQuery project that we plan to migrate in the future. Module bundling is handled by webpack, allowing us to optimize, minimize and deploy our static assets using Docker without much hassle.

Data is constantly on the move at Pollfish. From Apache Kafka, to Postgres, to Apache Druid and Cassandra, to the data-lake. Distributed programming based on Apache Spark, and Apache Flink is leveraged to efficiently handle the immense amounts of data that Pollfish has to process daily. Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence models allow Pollfish to tackle fraud, and improve data quality.

Innovation and technical excellence always need to go hand in hand with software quality and the necessary processes to ensure it. Hence, at Pollfish we always try to write testable code and deliver tests together with every piece of software that we write.