Senior Backend Software Engineer - Python

Location: Ottawa or Toronto, ON, Canada

Department: Software Engineering

Ouster is a NASDAQ listed company with a range of lidar sensors and software solutions built on top of those sensors. Our advanced vision algorithms and sensor hardware are used in autonomous cars, drones, robots, smart intersections, and many other applications. If you’re motivated by solving big problems, we’re hiring key roles across the company and need your help!

Your role will primarily involve working on Ouster’s Blue City solution with the mission of making roads safer, reducing commute times, and cutting emissions. We develop software that provides cities with the information needed to better understand and improve their transportation network. Our small, tightknit, team consists of engineers with backgrounds in Transportation and Software Engineering, dedicated to this mission.

We are seeking a dynamic and passionate software engineer who will be a key player in architecting, developing, and maintaining our backend infrastructure, APIs, services, and analytics.

You will be working on the cloud infrastructure that makes a cutting edge distributed system like ours possible. Our infrastructure enables live streaming of raw lidar pointclouds efficiently to many clients, continuous streaming of data from our edge computers at the intersection to the cloud to perform analytics, and gives users access to the analytics we calculate. 

You will also be making roads safer by creating analytics like our near miss detection, which finds close calls between vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians. This lets cities do before and after studies on infrastructure changes, see the change in rate of close calls, and even view 3D recordings of individual events to better understand issues at their intersections.

Job Responsibilities:

• Design, build and maintain a complex, in production, distributed system at scale
• Develop robust Python and Rust code to support product functionalities
• Work with the team and individually to architect and implement our cloud infrastructure and applications
• Collaborate on developing microservices to generate traffic analytics
• Architect solutions to satisfy requirements
• Break down design into engineering requirements
• Collaborate with other internal software teams

What we’re looking for:

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline
• 7+ years of experience in coding for production software applications
• 5+ years of experience in distributed system design with focus on scalability
• Extensive experience in designing and implementing backend applications using Python is required
• Strong experience developing high performance applications in a compiled language such as C++, Rust, or Go, is highly desirable
• Strong experience designing and managing high performance databases, with an emphasis on Postgres. (Bonus for experience with time-series data)
• Experience using a variety of communication protocols (TCP, GRPC, MQTT, etc.) and understanding of fundamental networking concepts
• Strong familiarity with developing in Linux environments
• Thorough knowledge of AWS technologies available to optimally architect cloud solutions
• A solid understanding of how to design, develop, test, and monitor production backend systems
• Strong understanding of Cloud Security best practices and standards
• Experience with Docker, Jenkins, and Terraform
• Excellent problem-solving abilities
• Strong communication skills

Bonus points:

• Experience in the ITS industry or Transportation Engineering
• Past experience working with embedded systems
• Experience programming in Rust