Staff Software Engineer

Job Summary:

You’ll join the team primarily responsible for the availability, scalability and resiliency of our customers’ systems, as well as our backend development stack. However, since we’re still a small but growing software engineering organization, this role is not strictly limited to any single part of our product or stack.

This role is about more than writing code: you'll have an influential voice in shaping our technical direction, our product, and our culture. We have a hugely supportive and collaborative engineering team that takes great pride in the work we do and the challenges we solve. We’re eager to help grow and nurture each other’s abilities and also create an environment where we have the ability to do our very best work.

Location:

You can work fully remotely from anywhere in an EST state with a preference for being based in the Greater Boston Area area. Here, you can make use of our Tines office space in downtown Boston to meet up with other members of the MA engineering team when you wish.

In this role, you’ll:

• Work closely with colleagues to build the right solutions to the problems our customers face.
• Make valuable changes in our codebase in your first week, and see them live in production minutes after merging them.
• Identifying and fixing availability risks and monitoring gaps to ensure our systems stay healthy and available.
• Write and review high quality, well tested code to ensure that we’re creating a stable product for our customers, and a stress-free codebase for ourselves.
• Identify areas for improvement, both in our codebase and in how we work, and share the responsibility of making our team better.
• Own the problems you’re solving - and the software you write to solve them - all the way to production and beyond, responding to customer feedback to improve those solutions.

Projects you might work on:

• Re-architecting our code execution feature to simplify how our customers run python scripts and powershell commands from their workflows.
• Upgrading our PostgreSQL DBs across cloud and self-hosted installations to get access to new features and improvements while ensuring minimal downtime for customers.
• Enabling our larger customers to configure multiple SSO providers to access specific parts of the product.
• Defining and developing new metrics to provide an extremely accurate measurement of our overall availability and reliability in powering our customers’ most important workflows.
• Collaborating with our Customer Success team to simplify the upgrade process for customers with on-premise installations.
• Writing a blog post to share something interesting we learned with the community.
• Profiling our continuous deployment pipeline to diagnose performance issues and ensure our feedback loop stays fast.

Is this role right for you?

• You’ll need to be capable with a high-level programming language. Our interview process includes building a small command-line program that makes decisions based on some JSON input, so you should feel very comfortable working at that level of technical complexity. Our main languages are Ruby and TypeScript, but you don’t have to be familiar with those - we value curiosity and an eagerness to learn over existing experience. We’ll also cover the cost of education material to bring you up to speed.
• You’ll need to have a proven track record of operating cloud infrastructure in a SaaS environment. Our cloud offering is primarily hosted on AWS, with ECS, RDS (PostgreSQL), Elasticache and ALB as the main services powering that offering. We use AWS CDK as our IaC tooling and Honeycomb for observability.
• Your abilities matter, not your education or experience. We don’t require any specific degree or previous work experience. We just need you to show us that you have the skills needed to succeed.
• Cybersecurity knowledge isn’t required. We take application security seriously, but for this role you don’t need any specific knowledge or experience.
• This role is broad, not specialised. You’ll work across our backend, frontend and infrastructure. You don’t need to have expertise in all of these areas (no one on the team does), but you will need to be comfortable pitching in anywhere when needed, with the support of your teammates. This allows us to be more effective as a team, and provides a lot of opportunities for you to learn.
• We’re focused on the most important problems, not the most interesting ones. Your time and energy are limited, so in order to succeed you’ll need to spend it where it will make a difference. We view technologies as a means to an end, and stick to simple, common tools - Ruby, Rails, React, TypeScript, Postgres, Redis and Docker.
• We work healthily and sustainably. We work reasonable hours, we take our holidays and we plan our workloads realistically. No matter how excited we get by a project, it’s more important to not get burnt out from overwork.
• Your contributions will be obvious. On a small team like ours, you don’t have to spend a tonne of time and energy making sure your work is seen - your impact will be clear to everyone.
• We’re building an inclusive, supportive team. We have a wonderfully wide spectrum of colleagues at Tines, and we treat them all with kindness and respect - we expect that you will too. We don’t hire people that treat their colleagues badly, no matter how talented they are.

We’re bringing programming to everyone. As software engineers, we can appreciate the power of using software to automate manual work.  In our team, we get to use our knowledge to help bring this power to our customers, without them having to learn how to code.

Target Annual Compensation: $230 - 260k

For U.S. roles: Applicants for this opportunity must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.