Staff Engineer, Backend - Brand Platform

Position title: Staff Engineer

Location: US-Remote  #LI-Remote

Reports to: VP, Engineering 

About you:

You're looking for a career where you'll be able to build, to deliver, and to impress. You look at problems holistically, and want to work on projects where you are implementing solutions to real problems that require creative solutions and deep understanding of the problem space. You challenge yourself and your team to constantly come up with simpler and better solutions to complex problems. This highly visible role requires frequent communication with senior leadership in order to shape Brand Platform strategy and roadmap. You’ll nimbly switch between strategic and tactical initiatives to achieve technical, business, and customer experience goals. Ultimately, you'll be responsible for owning and driving initiatives across the Brand Platform’s software stack.

About us together:

We're going to change the way that Creators collaborate with Brands to maximize their economic success. Along the way, we're going to face seemingly impossible problems. We're going to argue about how to solve them, and we'll work together to find a solution that is superior to each of the proposals we came in with. We'll make tough decisions, but we'll all understand why. We'll be the dream team.

The ideal Staff Engineer for this space will be highly quantitative, have great judgment and passion for delivering tremendous business value in an uncharted domain through a scalable system that anticipates significant growth across multiple dimensions. You’ll be inventive, and have a pragmatic and iterative approach to delivering high quality software. You’ll simplify and get things done, working effectively with engineering teams across the company.

Some problem spaces we'll be working on:

BRAND PERFORMANCE - Influencer marketing is a newly emerging opportunity for Brands to drive product awareness. The long-form collaborations developed by influencers are more effective than static and video advertising, yet the ability to measure their performance is nascent at best. We need to quickly develop expertise that allows us to inform Brands where the largest opportunities exist to achieve their Brand goals and demonstrate, through performance, how influencer marketing supplements and improves their traditional media plans. We’ll do this by building intuitive and comprehensive targeting, selection, optimization and reporting often deferring to ML given the complexity of the interactions of our data.

MARKETPLACE - We need to scale, and we’ll do this by developing a thriving marketplace that Brands and Creators love. We’ll start with a focus on long tail Brands, but our ultimate goal is to build a self-service platform that the head Brands prefer to use. When we’ve scaled our Brand platform, we’ll repeat the process for Creators, creating opportunity for Creators, no matter their level of proficiency. We’ll seek to educate and improve both sides of the marketplace, and by doing so, lift the performance of Influencer marketing. We’re not going to stop there: we’ll discover how to deliver performance regardless of the campaign goals, and we’ll establish new verticals. Any one of these aspirations would be challenging, so we’ll ruthlessly prioritize until we’re done.

DATA - we need to become great with data, starting with integrations with all Social Media and Influencer platforms, but quickly extending to satisfy our thirst for data. We’ll look for new ways to interpret the data that we have, on platform and that we ingest from third parties, with an aim to tease out new learnings that differentiate LTK from our competitors. We’ll want to provide real value to Brands and Creators alike and we believe that we’ll get there by excelling with data. We know that we need to develop new muscles with Machine Learning and AI. We'll know when we’re done when Brand performance uncertainty is a distant memory.

Questions?:

You may already know if you're a fit, but perhaps you're worried about technology and experience requirements? Don't be - we're looking for smart and proven engineers; if you're the right candidate, we're flexible.

How you will make an impact: 

• Technical Expertise: Bring a strong command of multiple programming languages, frameworks, and technologies relevant. Expertise in designing and building complex systems, architecture, and solutions.
• Problem Solving: Demonstrate your ability to solve complex technical challenges, provide innovative solutions, and influence technical direction.
• Innovation: Track record of introducing new technologies, tools, or practices that enhance engineering efficiency, productivity, and quality.
• System Design: Proficiency in system design and architecture, with the ability to create scalable, maintainable, and performant solutions.
• Problem Ownership: Willingness to take ownership of complex issues, drive problem resolution, and act as a technical leader in crisis situations.

What you will bring to LTK: 

Leadership:

• Leadership: Proven leadership skills, including mentoring and guiding junior engineers, leading technical initiatives, and collaborating with cross-functional teams.
• Project Management: Ability to lead projects from conception to completion, manage timelines, resources, and priorities effectively.
• Continuous Learning: A commitment to staying up-to-date with industry trends, tools, and methodologies, and a passion for sharing knowledge with peers.

Work Management/Communication:

• Communication: Excellent communication skills to effectively convey technical concepts, collaborate with non-technical stakeholders, and provide guidance on technical decisions.
• Influence: Ability to influence technical decisions across teams and mentor others in technical skills and practices.
• A mindset focused on seizing opportunities and moving with urgency
• Dedication to fierce prioritization and operational excellence
• Adaptability to a dynamic, fast-moving environment
• A growth mindset and openness to feedback

 Technical Skills:

• ​​Experience: more than 8 years demonstrating a deep understanding of software development principles, architecture, and best practices.
• Degree: A bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field is preferred, although relevant work experience can sometimes compensate for formal education.

Nice to have: 

• Data Storage: Expertise in working with various data storage technologies, including relational databases, NoSQL databases (like Hadoop HDFS, Apache Cassandra), and columnar databases.
• Data Processing: Strong understanding of data processing frameworks like Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Apache Beam, or Hadoop MapReduce. Experience in designing and optimizing data processing pipelines for performance and scalability is important.
• Streaming Data: Knowledge of stream processing frameworks like Apache Kafka or Apache Pulsar is valuable for handling real-time data streams.
• Cloud Platforms: Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, and their big data services (e.g., Amazon EMR, Azure HDInsight, Google Cloud Dataproc).
• Containerization and Orchestration: Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration tools (Kubernetes) for deploying and managing big data applications.
• Data Modeling and ETL: Understanding of data modeling concepts and experience with Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes for transforming and moving data between systems.
• Optimization: Proficiency in optimizing big data applications for performance, throughput, and resource utilization.
• Machine Learning and AI: Depending on the use case, familiarity with machine learning frameworks (like TensorFlow, PyTorch) and AI techniques can be beneficial for building intelligent applications on big data.