Staff Software Engineer, Core Libraries - Slack

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Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

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Background

Slack enables people all over the world to communicate and collaborate together. Teams of all scales — from the world’s largest public companies to the smallest of startups — use Slack to get work done, so we take performance and reliability very seriously. A taste of our scale:

• The average user spends over 10 hours connected and 2.5 hours active in Slack every single day
• 1.5 billion+ messages are sent per month, half of those outside the United States
• Every day we see over 10M+ daily active users, over a billion web requests, and 10s of billions of database queries.
• We handle about 600k requests per second, summing up the entire day gets us at about 6 billion API requests served per day.
• For millions of people, Slack is the primary communication tool they use at work all day long. They expect it to be exceptionally reliable and fast, all the time.

About the Team
Webapp Infra (WIN) pillar provides the tools to make it possible for hundreds of developers to develop in a multi million line codebase with safety and productivity at the forefront. WIN handles maintenance and upgrades of the Hack programming language, static analysis tooling, widely used libraries in the codebase, asynchronous job queue, as well as tuning and debugging the HHVM runtime and other services it depends on. With four sub-teams : Core Libraries, Runtime, Reliability aka WIRE and Asynchronous Services (AServ), the Webapp infra team supports the middle layers of the stack above the AWS instances and below the product code. This role is open for the Core Libraries sub-team.
Webapp Core Libraries maintains and develop the Webapp API, language tooling and enable co-development of infrastructure and product features. Our customers are both Core Infrastructure service owners, and backend developers. Core Librarians have deep knowledge of Webapp internals, infrastructure sensibilities and a product perspective. We build relationships and durable feedback loops at the intersection of the Webapp API.
We rapidly iterate and work closely with other teams in engineering to ensure we build resilient systems that can scale. We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability should be primary aspects of the systems that we build. We are ambitious, emathetic, independent, and pragmatic.
 

What you will be doing:

• Collaborate with peers across Engineering to triage bugs and troubleshoot complex production issues across the stack, especially with respect to performance, memory, and stability

• Write, review, or provide feedback on a technical design proposal

• Maintain client libraries that allow backend engineers to access all the capabilities of the Webapp platform

• Work with the Webapp Hack Language static analysis tooling (Hakana), health score tooling, legacy code migration, and metadata insights (Census) and error tooling infra (Sieve).

• Get feedback on and own the direction and growth of the Webapp standard libraries, and Core Service client; comprising encryption, storage, caching and other features.

• Webapp customer engagement, including NPS survey and interviews, best-practices, and dev advocacy to understand at the core the challenges facing product developers at Slack. Our work enables the future of Slack’s product at the nexus of Core Infra and Product eng.

What you should have:

• Possess strong Computer Science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, programming languages, operating system, distributed systems.

• Strong systems thinking abilities. You can reason about queues, retries, concurrency and contention and use them to build useful models of real software.

• Experience with Linux, including common debugging and profiling tools.

• Experience building large scale systems professionally for 8-10 years and can point to things you’ve worked on.

• Experience improving performance and reliability of a complex system. You enjoy finding opportunities for performance and memory improvements through extensive profiling.

• Experience with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). You have deployed plenty of code to live production environments, and understand what it takes to do so safely but efficiently.

• Can jump into situations with few guardrails and make things better.

• Write code that can be easily understood by others with an eye towards clarity and maintainability.

• Are a very strong communicator. You’re excited to explain complex technical concepts and share your knowledge with different audiences. You thrive on feedback and seeing your work impact other teams.

• Are comfortable leading cross-functional projects and setting a vision for systems architecture.

• Are curious how things work and when things break you are eager and able to help fix them.

• Are comfortable mentoring and coaching engineers and sharing feedback.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Hack and HHVM (Hip Hop Virtual Machine), preferred Hack open source contributions.

• Have experience leading codebases or open-source software teams.

• A track record of dev advocacy and user-focused progress and success.

• Have experience building, profiling, and debugging systems software, like language runtimes, databases, web servers, virtual machines and operating systems.

• Built a team from the ground up and enjoy establishing team norms and durable feedback loops.

Infrastructure is a diverse and inclusive team that treats their colleagues exceptionally well. We are happy to help you learn what you need to know; we encourage and support each other’s growth and thus it’s not expected that you would have expertise across all of these areas. Come join us!

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

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Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

For Washington-based roles, the base salary hiring range for this position is $211,500 to $306,600.

For California-based roles, the base salary hiring range for this position is $230,800 to $334,600.