Senior Software Engineer

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help us build new features, deliver excellent customer service, and experiment with new technologies to help set the technical direction of the product.

This team works across all Posit Team products and manages deployments of Posit Academy and the Posit Team platform into customer-owned cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and GCP. 

Joining this team will give you the flexibility and influence that comes from working on an early stage product, but with the stability and work-life balance that comes from working at a profitable company. This is a great role for someone who wants to work on infrastructure, but also likes to dip their toes into full-stack development.

People who thrive in this role will tend to:

• Find joy in working directly with and unblocking partners and customers. This role involves more interaction with a wide variety of groups than the typical product team role.
• Be interested in Containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure. Much of the software we use will involve containerized environments and extend the images built by the Platform team.
• Be inquisitive and humble. Our team works in many areas, and partnership work can involve many still-developing projects. Great engineers will enjoy this uncertainty and constantly seek to learn more.
• Be open to making changes up and down the technology stack. While much of our work is in the infrastructure/backend realm, willingness to make changes to front-end code to enable customer self-service is a plus.

Things you’ll own:

• Development of new platform features and the infrastructure to support them, expanding our service from Kubernetes on AWS to additional cluster types like SLURM and additional clouds like Azure and GCP.
• Evaluate new technologies as the scale and surface area of the product evolve so you can participate with technology selection and implementation.
• Incorporate new infrastructure resources, including development of Kubernetes operators.

Things you’ll help with:

• Ensure that the team is prepared to scale to support additional customers in multiple cloud regions.
• Improve the security, performance, scalability, and reliability of existing backend services.
• Work directly with users to debug and resolve issues; consider how to improve the systems to increase reliability moving forward.
• Participate in on-call rotation to resolve system availability issues for customers.

Things you’ll teach the team:

• Help others on the team get acquainted with infrastructure components that you have expertise in, such as the AWS and Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Help create a collaborative and psychologically safe environment for team members. Model humility and compassion for others.
• Guide others in balancing the needs of stable, mission-critical systems with the desire to be able to experiment and prototype elsewhere.
• Aid in reducing the support burden of the product by helping the team properly incorporate instrumentation, logging, and distributed tracing.

Things you’ll learn:

• Languages and technologies we use that you don’t already know. We don't expect anybody coming in will know all the technologies that we work with. We work extensively with Go, Python, and Javascript. The product teams that we integrate with also use C++, Rust, R, and more.
• Gain familiarity with with the LGTM observability stack: Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir
• An appreciation for data science workflows, and some of the tools and methodologies used by data scientists.
• The Posit products and how they empower our customers to do effective data science, along with open-source data science tools like R, Python, and the infrastructure required for machine learning.

Bonus points if you have a head-start in any of these areas!

Timeline 一 What to Expect

Within 1 month, you will…

• Pair with an engineer on the team to design, develop, and merge a pull request into our infrastructure code.
• Deploy a change to production.
• Meet everyone on the team to begin building trust and rapport.

Within 3 months, you will…

• Take ownership of a small new feature. With some assistance, you’ll work with stakeholders or other engineers on the team to understand requirements, then design and implement the feature.
• Propose and champion improvements that will make the product more reliable, scalable and/or supportable.
• Track down and resolve an issue observed in production. Have enough of an understanding of our services to be able to track a request through to locate the bug; work with other engineers on the team to design a solution and resolve it. Deploy the fix to production.
• Take on a support rotation, escalating to other engineers on the team where necessary.

Within 6 months, you will...

• Take ownership of a significant feature or service component. Determine what support, user input, or resources will be required to design and deliver the feature then drive work to completion. Experiment with and evaluate any new technologies or systems that may be required to complete the feature.
• Be able to give an architectural overview of the major components of the product.

Within 12 months, you will…

• Advocate and build support for larger changes that would improve the product or the team. What improvements could we make in how we think about e.g. logging, alerting, scaling, storage, deployment, authentication, or monitoring?
• Be involved on a hiring panel for an engineering candidate.
• Lead an initiative that involves collaboration from additional engineers or teams. Document and communicate requirements, decisions, and what’s needed from others. Help garner consensus around technical decisions, respond to feedback, iterate rapidly with stakeholders to converge on a successful outcome.