Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

The role

Before reading further, take a look at our cultural values and see if it resonates with you!

We are looking for an engineer to join our team and help us unlock the full potential of our most critical asset: our data. You will have direct impact on our revenue and delivering value to our customers by ensuring that our systems can handle the complex relationship between our entities.

You will be responsible for scaling our knowledge graph infrastructure and managing our time series data. You will also evaluate and improve our data storage and taxonomy systems, and mentor and manage other engineers on the team.

We are looking for someone who is constantly looking for ways to increase the effectiveness of the team through the use of technology, and who shares our values of being low ego, obsessed, curious, and collaborative. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you!

What we value:

• Being customer-obsessed: At the start of each two-week sprint, we commit to our deliverables, focusing on customer impact and fulfilling commitments. Expect an environment of high personal accountability.
• Continuous self-improvement: We prioritize growth and feedback, celebrating wins & achievements while focusing on how we can strive to be even better next time. We exchange regular feedback and hold quarterly sessions to discuss each other's strengths and areas for growth, driving our development. We index heavily on introspection, openness to feedback, and direct communication.
• “Get shit done” attitudes: Even when things are uncertain, all of our team members excel at pushing projects ahead, asking the right questions, and overcoming obstacles to keep things moving. You understand the importance of balancing speed and quality, and you excel at communicating what can be realistically achieved given the circumstances.

Who you are:

• Inquisitive: What kind of topics pique your interest? What keeps you up late at night? What kind of problems do you like to solve?
• Accountable: Do you take psychological ownership of your work? What are your action steps when things don’t go according to plan? Can we count on your word?
• Engaged: How active are you in accomplishing your personal and professional goals? Are you proactive about identifying roadblocks? What do you do when you see something that isn’t working?

If you are curious about the team, here’s more information:

• Explore Working with Sang to understand decision-making processes related to the engineering function.
• Explore Team Page to get acquainted with us. We're an exceptionally collaborative and engaged group, deeply committed to our shared cultural values.

Specifically, you will:

• Derive deeper insight from our data by scaling our current knowledge graph infrastructure to handle hundreds of millions of startup related data.
• Deeply understand how our insight layer is connected to the rest of our application layer and ensure the needs of our customers as well as our teams are met by focusing on performance, observability, and most importantly customer demand.
• Evaluate how we store time series data and help us scale it 10x the current throughput in an iterative manner.
• Leverage ML infrastructure and services to continually improve our taxonomy and derive relevant signals from the underlying data.

Role requirements:

• Track record of building highly performant, highly observable, and highly scalable systems.
• 5+ years of experience building scalable distributed systems.
• Experience with streaming technologies (Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc).
• Experience with various data storage solutions (SQL, NoSQL / key-value stores).
• This is a hybrid position, we require 3 times a week in-office attendance. You can attend any of our offices:
  • Williamsburg, New York
  • Culver City, Los Angeles
  • San Mateo

Plus If...

• 2+ years of experience in an early-stage startup.
• 3+ years of experience in leading teams either as a Technical Lead or Engineering Manager.
• Proven track record migrating systems in a changing environment that allows for little to no downtime to meet increasing demand.
• Obsessed about your craft and share your knowledge (tech talks, articles, open source, etc).
• Experience in working in Python/strongly typed languages.

Pay

$170K - $250K Salary + Equity (flexible depending on the level)

Our stack

The Process

Our goal in hiring is to make sure we click on both sides. We’re all about saving time and not beating around the bush. If it’s not looking like a match, we’re upfront and quick to say so, keeping things honest and moving smoothly for everyone involved.

We despise the typical software engineering interview process because it does not align with our day-to-day work. We structured our interview process around pragmatism. Expect us to ask questions closely aligned with the work we expect you to do.

Here’s our interview process:

• (30 mins) Introduction Chat: Let's discuss whether Harmonic is the right place for you. We'll review your experience and allocate time for any questions you may have
• (30 mins) Hiring Manager Call: Here we focus on accountability, and how much personal ownership one takes of their work.
• (Max 5 hours) Take-Home Exercise: We will send you a description of one of our current company challenges and ask you to come up with a creative solution.
• (45 minutes each) Team interview: Meet with a member of our Product team to focus on how you would collaborate, and another member of our Engineering team to go over your take-home & conduct a technical assessment.
• (2.5 hours) Engineering Jam Session: Detailed discussion of the take-home and digging in deeper to measure technical skills. This will involve coding with 2-3 engineers on our team.
• (Async) Reference Checks
• (In person) Dinner/Lunch: Get to know Max, our CEO, over dinner! We can only get to know each other so much through video calls. We believe this is a critical hire and believe this investment is necessary. Flight and housing (if needed) are covered.