Life at Plume
At Plume, we believe that technology isn't about moving faster, it's about making life’s moments better. Which is why we’ve built the world's first, and only, open and hardware-independent service delivery platform for smart homes, small businesses, enterprises, and beyond. Our SaaS platform uses WiFi, advanced AI, and machine learning to create the future of connected spaces—and human experiences—at massive scale.
We now deliver services to over 60 million locations globally and have managed over 3 billion devices on our platform. We’re expanding rapidly, pioneering a new category, and we achieved our Series F funding in just four years. Our customers include many of the world's largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who look to Plume to help them evolve their smart home offerings while gleaning insights from their own data.
With a bias for action and a love for being trailblazers, the team at Plume embodies a combination of relentless curiosity and imaginative innovation. We challenge ourselves to think in ways that other companies don't, work to do what should be done (rather than what can), and if we can’t do it exceptionally well, we don’t do it. It’s how we've assembled a team of world-class builders, thinkers, and doers. And it’s how we’re reinventing what’s possible every day.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a key member of an engineering team responsible for the full lifecycle of Plume’s high-scale cloud platform. You will work across the full cloud stack, from the API and microservice layer, through compute and orchestration, to the data streaming, pipelines, and storage systems underneath, and the networking that connects them across regions. You will help keep a globally distributed architecture reliable at scale.
This role is critical in supporting our Tier 1 customers (Charter, Bell, LGI, Jio, J:COM) and ensuring the stability of environments managing Wi-Fi & Security for over 65 million homes and half a billion devices.
Responsibilities:- Full-Stack Backend Development: Design, develop, and maintain scalable microservices using Node.js (NestJS) and Scala (Akka), with a forward-looking transition toward Rust and Go.
- Architectural Refactoring: Lead the transition of legacy monolithic services into discrete microservices, ensuring better maintainability at scalability at Tier 1 scale.
- Database Management: Architect and manage data persistence layers across both SQL (Postgres) and NoSQL (Mongo/DocumentDB), utilizing Redis for high-performance caching and Kafka for scalable event streaming where applicable.
- System Optimization: Improve the performance, efficiency, and cost of our platform at massive scale, tackling challenges such as messaging and connectivity performance, cross-region latency, and compute and memory utilization.
- Resilient Design: Build services that are "self-healing," capable of handling dependency failures without cascading system-wide outages.
- Zero-Downtime Deployments: Implement and refine deployment strategies (Blue/Green, Canary) and infrastructure-as-code to ensure that code changes, schema migrations, and architectural refactors never interrupt the customer experience.
- Tier 1 Support & Reliability: Provide third-line support for production environments, including diagnosing release issues, delivering critical fixes, and resolving customer-specific anomalies.
- Operational Excellence: Participate in a compensated, opt-in on-call rotation to ensure 24/7 coverage across our global US, EU and APAC support teams.
- Backend Engineering: Proven experience in distributed systems and backend architecture.
- Languages/Frameworks: Strong experience with Scala or Java (Akka is a plus)
- TypeScript/Node.js is desired (Loopback 3 or NestJS is a plus)
- At least basic knowledge of Rust and Go
- Data Systems: Deep understanding of Kafka, Postgres and MongoDB/DocumentDB; ability to select the appropriate database (relational VS NoSQL) based on specific use cases.
- DevOps & Scale: Familiarity with AWS (including SageMaker, Data Pipelines) and GCP. Experience managing systems at a scale of millions of concurrent connections is a major plus.
- Networking / API Fundamentals
- Good understanding of HTTP/HTTPS and gRPC
- Familiarity with REST APIs, request/response lifecycle, headers, status codes, and error handling.
- Understanding of service-to-service communication and API integration patterns.
- Generalist Mindset: A desire to move beyond a single specialty to become a full-stack backend expert.
- Problem Solver: Ability to perform root-cause analysis on complex production issues under pressure.
- Collaborative: Comfortable working in a global team environment across multiple time zones and cultures (US, EU, APAC).
- On-Call: This role includes an opt-in, additional compensation model for on-call participation.
- Growth: Structured objectives via Lattice focused on cross-functional skill acquisition.
- Training: Company sponsored training for key technologies/capabilities.
About Plume
As the creator of the only open, hardware-independent, cloud-controlled experience platform for ISPs and their subscribers, Plume partners with over 400 ISP customers, including some of the world’s largest such as Charter, Liberty Global, and J:COM.
Using OpenSync, the most widely supported open-source, silicon-to-cloud framework for smart spaces, Plume’s software-defined network allows ISPs to decouple their service offerings from hardware and rapidly curate and deliver new services over a multi-vendor, open-platform architecture.
Plume is an equal opportunity workplace that maintains a continuing policy of nondiscrimination in all employment practices and decisions, ensuring equal employment opportunities for all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, pregnancy, childbirth or related individual conditions, medical conditions (as defined by state law), military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.
Skills Required
- Proven experience with distributed systems and backend architecture
- Strong experience with Scala or Java
- Basic knowledge of Rust and Go
- Deep understanding of Kafka, Postgres, and MongoDB or DocumentDB
- Ability to select relational or NoSQL databases based on use cases
- Familiarity with AWS, including SageMaker and Data Pipelines
- Familiarity with GCP
- Understanding of HTTP/HTTPS and gRPC
- Familiarity with REST APIs, request and response lifecycles, headers, status codes, and error handling
- Understanding of service-to-service communication and API integration patterns
- Experience with TypeScript and Node.js
- Experience with LoopBack 3 or NestJS
- Experience managing systems with millions of concurrent connections
- Experience with Akka
What We Do
The world’s first SaaS experience platform for Communications Service Providers. At Plume, we believe that technology isn't about moving faster. It's about making moments better. Which is why we've brought relentless focus to understanding the digital lifestyles people want to live, the spaces where they play out, and innovating ways to make digital experiences blossom. As the only open and hardware-independent solution, Plume enables the rapid delivery of new services for connected homes, small business, and beyond at massive scale. For residential subscribers, Plume delivers self-optimizing WiFi, cyber-security, access controls, and more. Our purpose-built suite of smart services turns small business networks into fully connected, business intelligence platforms. And Service Providers get robust back-end applications for unprecedented visibility and support. Our goal is simple: to keep you in the flow with any experiences you turn on. And to help you fill the spaces that matter to you with all kinds of wonderful. With a bias for action and love for breaking molds, the team at Plume embodies a combination of relentless curiosity and imaginative innovation. We constantly challenge ourselves to think in ways that other companies don't, and work to do what should be done (rather than what can). It’s how we've assembled a team of world-class engineers, thinkers, and doers. And it’s how we’re reinventing what’s possible every day. We believe that the core competitive advantage in the over-the-top era resides in the ability to create new services at high cadence, deploy them at massive scale, and to orchestrate through a common data set. Our flexible, cloud-controlled platform paired with an open-source software stack decouples service creation and delivery from dependence on proprietary hardware.
