Senior Software Engineer Backend Systems

A bit about us

Lever was founded nine years ago to tackle the most strategic challenge that companies face: how to recruit and hire top talent. We're building the next generation of hiring software that companies like Netflix, Atlassian, KPMG, and McGraw-Hill Education rely on to grow their teams. We've rethought the talent acquisition paradigm and are the innovation leaders in our space and looking for the right people to join us as we scale.

We're extraordinarily proud of the company we've built so far (not to mention humbled to be recognized as the #1 place to work in San Francisco, as well as a top workplace in the entire United States). Our people are Lever's biggest competitive advantage and we'll continue investing in our "Leveroos" and people-first culture.

The challenge

Lever is hiring a Backend Systems Engineer to own, improve, and scale existing services and create new services in order to support increased usage and increasingly large enterprise accounts. This role will be an integral part of our efforts to anticipate performance bottlenecks across all of Lever services and applications.

The opportunity

As a backend systems engineer, you will work with both our infrastructure engineers and our product engineers to improve the overall performance, reliability and scalability of our systems. From prototyping a new asynchronous messaging service, to implementing more efficient real-time indexing pipeline from MongoDB into Elasticsearch, to evolving our open source distributed real-time application backend, you'll be involved in projects that span all aspects of the business.

You will teach your peers patterns and best practices for production systems learned in previous roles as well as those gained from a broad understanding of Lever systems. At the same time, you'll learn from the unique challenges operating a large scale real-time eventually consistent data model. Our applications are powered by ShareDB, our distributed real-time application backend. ShareDB syncs all data via Operational Transformation, the same algorithm that powers Google Docs.

The team

Your experience will be the catalyst to help bolster Lever's backend systems team. Our goals include scaling and improving the architecture of systems to support advanced product features that may not be currently viable because of hard technical considerations. You'll collaborate with our small, but effective, framework team with a track record of highly impactful work for Lever. You'll join a broader team where everyone-including you-is striving to constantly improve their knowledge of infrastructure, systems, and cares about minimizing downtime. We are an incredibly supportive team-we love to pitch in when problems arise and give great peer feedback to help each other grow. We are passionate about lots of things--automation, friendly chat bots, creating a great hiring experience, and a great user experience--and we love sharing those passions with each other.

Read about what our team values and why here.

The tech stack and skill set:

We're looking for someone with some of the following skills and a strong desire to learn:

• Event relay and streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ
• Performance benchmarking and diagnostic tools
• Monitoring, tracing, and profiling
• Experience bringing software to production at high scale
• The knack for writing, clean, readable, maintainable code
• An eye for automation and instrumentation
• The ability to decompose complex systems and find failure scenarios
• Great communication
• Public cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc)
• Lever makes extensive use of AWS, Docker, Node.js, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Redis within our infrastructure. We use tools like Hubot to streamline deployments and Datadog to see what's going on under the hood. In addition to automating all the things, we love to version them too! Our systems are all created using Terraform and Chef, working together to ensure consistency at all costs. The backend systems team will also work with JavaScript, DerbyJS, ShareDB, IMAP, SMTP, Gmail, Google Calendar and Office365 APIs.
• Read more about The Lever Tech Stack from one of our Software Engineers, Eric Hwang.

Within 1 month, you'll

• Complete Lever's new-hire training week (a.k.a. Ramp Camp), and learn what it means to build a powerful recruiting platform.
• Ramp up on Lever's engineering stack by pair-programming with your teammates and attending engineering training sessions designed and presented by your peers.
• Complete your engineering starter project and deploy your first changes to production!

Within 3 months, you'll

• Improve the reliability of our asynchronous job processing and messaging service by making it resilient to stuck and large tasks.
• Let Lever gracefully handle MongoDB or redis downtime.
• Implement more efficient real-time indexing pipeline from MongoDB into Elasticsearch.
• Implement on-demand reindexing of Elasticsearch for an account or all accounts without interruption of service.
• Provide mentoring to more junior engineers in their progress on business and personal career goals.

Within 6 months, you'll

• Design and prototype a replacement for our asynchronous job processing and messaging service, leveraging established frameworks as appropriate.
• Measure capacity and latency of email sync service, project upcoming needs based on historical growth, and increase throughput to handle needs for 12 months from now.
• Improve scalability of Lever's open source real-time database backend, ShareDB.
• Work closely with product engineering to educate on best practices: how to write efficient database queries, patterns for more performant tasks, identify performance bottlenecks for large customer accounts (i.e. how to write Derby components performantly).
• Grow engineering team by recruiting, interviewing and developing more effective ways to onboard engineers.

Within 12 months, you'll

• Contribute to the architecture and implementation choices of projects across engineering to ensure that decisions are in line with best practices and requirements of large scale distributed systems.
• Predict our future failures and work proactively to mitigate them.
• Work with the engineering leadership team to align and establish the priorities for the backend systems team that you'll then tackle.
• Identify data quality issues and write internal tools to improve data consistency.
• Profile and optimize most expensive taskqueue jobs and crons.
• Optimize API for large accounts and increasing volume of operations.
• Optimize search and database query performance.
• Define tools and standards for product engineering to measure performance impact of releases.
• Drive service reliability by developing tooling that enables metric visibility using SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs.
• Developing Production Readiness standards to ensure service reliability.

Is this role not an exact fit?

Sign up to stay in touch, we'll let you know when we have new positions on the team.

The lever story

Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview, and hire top talent. Our team strives to set a new bar for enterprise software with modern, well-designed, real-time apps. We participated in Y Combinator in summer 2012, and since then have raised $73 million. As the applicant tracking system of choice for Netflix, Atlassian, KPMG, and McGraw-Hill Education, and thousands more leading companies, Lever means you hire the best by hiring together.

Lever is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations and will work with you to meet your needs. If you are a person with a disability and require assistance during the application process, please don't hesitate to reach out! We celebrate our inclusive work environment and welcome members of all backgrounds and perspectives. Learn more about our team culture and commitment to diversity and inclusion.

California residents applying for positions at Lever can see our privacy policy here.