Staff Software Engineer, Backend
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Slack is looking for Staff Backend Engineers to build features, design and implement API methods, and improve the performance and reliability of our systems as we rapidly scale our product and organization. We have backend engineers in almost every team across Slack, and in that role, you'll be making some of the most significant decisions for the company.

We build our app using reliable tools that our team knows and trusts, including PHP/Hack, Java, MySQL, and Linux. Expertise in these areas is a huge plus, but having familiarity with other common web languages (such as Python or Ruby) and other relational databases are fine substitutes. We're a collaborative team who genuinely enjoys working together with a cross-functional team of product managers, designers, frontend, iOS, Android, automation, and quality engineers to make Slack a better product. We are looking for engineers that understand that simplicity and reliability are aspects of a system to be carefully calculated with every decision made.

A taste of our scale and reach:

* Users spend over 10 hours connected and 2+ hours active in Slack every work day.
* 10M+ Daily Active Users in more than 150 countries.
* 1.5 billion messages are sent per month, half of those outside the United States.
* Every day we see over 3.5 million simultaneously connected users, over 3.5 billion web requests, over 42 billion database queries per day, and our systems see over 1 million queries/second in our caching tier.
* We have 8.8M+ app installations with 155,000 weekly active developers building on the platform.
* 90% of our paid teams on Slack actively use apps.

This is a full time Staff engineering position based in San Francisco, California.

What you will be doing

* You'll own technical strategy for broad or complex requirements with insightful and forward-looking approaches that go beyond the direct team and solve large open-ended problems.
* You'll participate in the strategic development of methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for projects and programs.
* You'll lead a broad functional area and directs efforts through team leads along with team's overall planning.
* You'll brainstorm with Product Managers, Designers, and Frontend Engineering to conceptualize and build new features for our large (and growing!) user base.
* You'll actively own features or systems and define their long-term health, while also improving the health of surrounding systems.
* You'll assist our skilled support team and operations team in triaging and resolving production issues.
* You'll develop & implement tests for ensuring the quality, performance, & scalability of our application.
* You'll mentor other engineers and deeply review code.
* You'll improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes

What you should have

* You've been building web applications professionally for 7+ years.
* You have experience with functional or imperative programming languages -- e.g., PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, C, or Java.
* You can lead technical architecture discussions and help drive technical decisions within your team.
* You write understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability.
* You are a strong communicator. Explaining complex technical concepts to designers, support, and other engineers is no problem for you.
* You possess strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, programming languages, distributed systems, and information retrieval.
* You have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.

Slack has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture-we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?

Slack is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participant in the U.S. Federal E-Verify program. Women, minorities, individuals with disabilities and protected veterans are encouraged to