Staff Platform Engineer

With our growing customer base and our expansion into new markets and use cases, we have more to build than ever at Affinity as we execute on our vision to put relationship intelligence at every professional's fingertips.

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you'll have the opportunity to help build the systems that allow our teams to move faster and focus on building features our customers love. You will be leading and managing a medium and growing Platform Engineering team, and you'll define the future of core pieces of our entire stack across areas like library design, authentication, observability, standards and tooling. From making front end iteration faster to building services and tools to make developing APIs easier and more reliable to making self-service infrastructure available to teams, you'll hone your skills across multiple domains while helping to drive forward the Affinity product and vision. 

In this role, you will:

• Through cross-team collaboration with engineering, product and design, define, manage and communicate platform engineering's roadmap to prioritize the most impactful improvements to our systems
• Own the development experience and productivity of our engineering organization
• Manage, grow, and develop the Platform Engineering Team
• Drive technology improvements, scalability, and robustness of our platform via close partnership across engineering organization
• Design and build efficient and performant cloud architectures that act as the backbone of our applications
• Create common components and libraries spanning all levels of our technology stack that help teams work faster and produce faster, more reliable and more correct solutions.
• Participate in on-call rotation to address production issues

Qualifications:

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

• You take pride in delivering high-quality and powerful products to customers while also championing technical excellence
• You have 8+ years of experience working in backend software engineering, with at least 3+ years of acting as a senior team lead or staff engineer, leading complex, engineering projects across teams
• You have 1+ years of people management experience, and you enjoy mentoring, coaching and supporting career growth and development
• You have experience leading high performing teams, mentoring more junior engineers, and uplifting everyone around you
• You possess a deep understanding of Kubernetes and its ecosystem
• You have experience building APIs that are easy to use, intuitive, self documenting and easy to maintain
• You have experience building tools to improve developer productivity at all parts of the stack. You understand ways to make development experience better and application maintenance easier, and excel in working closely with key product and delivery stakeholders to design solutions or migrate to new standards
• You possess strong expertise in modern OOD and OOP principles and practices
• You have a strong understanding of distributed systems and infrastructure and how modern applications are deployed to cloud providers using technologies like Terraform, Docker, Kustomize and helm
• You understand the testing pyramid and have extensive experience writing functional, unit, integration and infrastructure tests, utilizing and promoting industry best practices for testing.
• You've helped your teams to solve high-scale challenges, to integrate systems, or to harden your product’s security posture
• You’ve applied DORA/SPACE metrics and know to measure and improve developer experience
• You're excited to work collaboratively within engineering and as part of a cross functional team

Nice to have:

• Experience with modern front-end build systems like webpack
• Ruby development experience is a strong plus 

Tech stack:

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, and with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. Our data platform utilizes Kafka, AWS SQS, Redis, Databricks, Spark, and AWS technologies such as SageMaker. Our infrastructure is deployed using Terraform and Python for serverless and is hosted on AWS and runs on Kubernetes (EKS).

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver incremental value to our customers each sprint.
• We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with. 
• We make data driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available.

Join us in enabling every professional on the planet to succeed by harnessing the power of their relationships.

If you’d want to learn more about our values click here.

What you’ll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values as playmakers, obsessed with learning, care personally about our colleagues and clients, are radically open-minded, and take pride in everything we do.
• Health Care coverage and flexible personal & sick days. We want our team to be happy and healthy :)
• We provide an annual budget for you to spend on education and offer a comprehensive L&D program – after all, one of our core values is that we’re #obsessedwithlearning! 
• We support our employee’s overall health and well-being and reimburse monthly for things such as; Transportation, Home Internet, Meals, and Wellness memberships/equipment.
• Virtual team building and socials. Keeping people connected is essential.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity or benefits. This represents the salary that Affinity, in good faith, believes it will pay for the posted job at the time of this posting.

A reasonable estimate of the midpoint for the base salary is around $200,000 CAD. Individual pay depends on various factors, including geographical location and the applicant’s experience and knowledge.