Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Architecture & Systems)

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Slack is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Backend Architecture and Systems team within the Application Architecture and Systems organization. This team is responsible for bridging the reliability and performance needs of Slack’s Desktop, Mobile, and Web clients with the capabilities of our Backend. Our team establishes development principles and abstractions meant to deliver reliable, high-performance features and clients.

We are looking for an engineer who is passionate about the backend technologies powering client boot, improving fundamental and core Common Slack Objects that all product engineers depend on (What is a user?), and who is eager to improve backend code safety across the organization. This engineer should love keeping up to date with the evolving capabilities of PHP/Hack and form opinions about how the codebase should evolve over time, increasing developer efficiency and iterating on best practices with the rest of the backend teams.

Our work depends on working closely with other teams at Slack, so communication and collaboration skills are a must. This is an opportunity to work on a team of skilled and impactful engineers that directly affects how Slack’s clients interact and scale with its Backend.
 

What you will be doing:

• You’ll own the technical strategy for broad or complex requirements with insightful and forward-looking approaches that go beyond the direct team and solve large open-ended problems, producing RFCs and other technical documentation for review. 

• You’ll leverage insightful metrics to measure and lead cross-functional backend initiatives associated with increasing backend productivity, reliability, and performance

• You’ll bridge Slack’s Client experiences with the evolving state of our Backend

• You’ll maintain and improve the abstractions and developmental paradigms that power the Slack backend, leaving it better than you found it.

• You’ll proactively identify and remedy communication gaps and issues to reach alignments for complex issues across diverse audiences and influence organizational goals and strategy

• You’ll dive deep into the code through root cause analysis, code reviews, paired programming, and ensure adherence to best practices including the development and execution of tests 

• You’ll be an engaging and active storyteller. Celebrate and broadcast your team wins, challenges, learnings, and observations through Slack posts, talks, executive presentations, and through mentorship across the wider Slack developer community. 

What you should have:

• You’ve been building web applications professionally for 7+ years.

• You have experience with functional or imperative programming languages -- e.g., PHP/Hack, Python, Ruby, Go, C, or Java.

• You can lead technical architecture discussions and help drive technical decisions across the organization.

• You write and have strong opinions on understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability.

• You’re excited about diving into ambiguous and unfamiliar areas of the backend codebase, leaving it better than you found it.

• You have strong written and verbal communication skills and can tailor conversations to a diverse audience; equally comfortable communicating with your immediate team, other engineers (both backend and client), as well as non-technical Slack peers.

• You have an eagerness to learn, but a similar excitement to teach and mentor.

• You have an avid curiosity to investigate and understand not only your team’s pain points but pain points for all of Slack users through data, client metrics, user-reported defects, escalations, and through participating and remediating incidents. 

• You understand that the perfect solution is informed by the people who will be building on your work, rather than being purely dependent on technical merits. Empathy is a feature.

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