Staff Software Engineer

Sage Recruiting is looking for a Founding Engineer for a seed funded startup with offices in New York and San Francisco (remote-first, offices optional). Our client is supported by top Silicon Valley funds, as well as individuals from esteemed institutions such as NVIDIA, Docker, AWS and Redis Labs. The founding team are all from a company that was acquired in 2019 by a public AI-focused company.

Our client is focused on building a next generation serverless data platform that can revolutionize how data engineers and scientists work. Their goal is to abstract data infrastructure away from engineers and data scientists, so that they can focus solely on building data driven applications with concepts they already know. The initial system was brought to market a few months ago, and it’s live at enterprise scale.

What you will do

You will be responsible for refining the foundations of our platform and kick-off new exciting features. You will be working with the rest of the engineering team to prioritize, design and execute the company vision. In particular:

• Implement performant systems to run data workloads over S3.
• Analyze existing systems in the light of customer workloads and product requirements, propose and implement enhancements.
• Own the development of new features, starting from user-facing requirements and building on / refining existing abstractions together with the rest of the team.
• Evaluate approaches in the literature to recommend innovative solutions to the peculiar challenges we encounter as the platform evolves.
• Help with the development of our internal and external libraries, and proactively works at the integrations with open source tooling whenever necessary.
• Work with the team to assist customers with triaging issues, debugging problems, and generally ensure a good experience for everybody on the platform, minimizing incidents and providing clarifications as needed.
• Collaborate with others to ensure quality of codebase and continuously improve our development cycle (CI/CD, iteration speed, security etc.).

What we are looking for:

• Excellent communication skills: writing and reading design docs, giving and receiving feedback, lead technical discussions, communicate challenges and solutions effectively at different resolution levels
• Expertise in both Python and Golang
• Modern software development practices: Git, Docker, infra-as-code, CI/CD, testing, open telemetry etc.
• Async programming and concurrency.
• Extensive experience with cloud-based infrastructure (AWS preferred) and distributed systems design, with expertise in managing high-availability and fault-tolerant systems
• Dialect of SQL (know SELECT syntax and basic OLAP queries)
• Expertise distributed systems (e.g. k8s for webservices, Spark for data transformation, or custom distributed infrastructure);
• Well-versed in Cloud services, with focus on AWS to start

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of C++ / Rust;
• Working knowledge of existing FaaS frameworks (e.g. OpenWhisk, OpenFaas);
• Previous experience with data-specific abstractions (distributed transactions, query planning, data catalogs etc.);
• Theoretical knowledge related to correctness, verification, simulation of distributed systems.

What we offer

$170k – $250k & Equity (0.5% – 1.0%)

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation.