Senior Backend Engineer - Applications
NewsWhip is the leading provider of predictive media intelligence, tracking and predicting engagement with the world’s news stories each day.
Our platform is used each day by journalists at hundreds of top tier publications, and communications professionals at all 10 of the top 10 global PR agencies, dozens of international brands, and NGOs, international organisations and not-for-profits.
As an Irish company, our product and engineering functions are central to our business. This presents a great opportunity to directly input into what we build and how we build it. There is a direct link between your work, our customers and the continued success of NewsWhip.
As a Senior Backend Engineer on our Applications Team, you will be a key player in defining how this insight is delivered to customers. As an Applications Team member your remit will extend beyond just the ownership of delivery - you will be assisting in the research, refinement and execution of the features used to expose the value collated in our Data Platform to our customers in intuitive and novel ways.
Responsibilities:
- Develop features and improvements to NewsWhip products in a secure, well-tested, and performant way
- Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within Engineering (Frontend, UX, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment
- Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance
- Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.
- Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team ("technical debt"), propose and implement solutions
Requirements:
- 5+ years working in a Product Engineering team
- Experience collaborating with Product, Design and Frontend Engineering disciplines to deliver data-insight led features including activities relating to scoping, prototyping & research, identification of risks/uncertainties etc.
- Knowledge of software design principles and leading software development practices
- Willingness to get things done, learn new things, take initiative and challenge existing assumptions and conventions
- Experience with Java and/or Scala
- Experience building and deploying to any cloud service (GCP, AWS, Azure, etc.)
- Experience with building APIs for exposing rich datasets
Nice to have:
- Working with the Lightbend Reactive Platform of Scala, Akka or Play Framework
- Building an architecture to support rapid and stable product iteration cycles
- Significant development experience working on customer-facing and web-based systems
- Experience working in an agile environment with iterative development and fast feedback
- Working with storage systems such as Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Kafka and MySQL
- Experience with observability principals (Instrumentation, Tracing, Telemetry)
- Experience with IaC and DevOps methodologies
- Knowledge of basic Linux administration, Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform
Benefits:
- Competitive salary
- Health insurance
- Pension
- Great working environment - remote first or hybrid model
- An opportunity to help define an entirely new industry category
Our ethos:
We believe in maintaining a friendly work environment, a healthy work-life balance, and compensating our employees fairly for their input. You’ll be part of a team that believes in mutual support and education, and for a company where a work week isn’t just the gap between weekends, but an opportunity to do work that is impactful and innovative. We also love eating and socializing together, annual and seasonal company and team retreats, healthy and unhealthy snacks and other perks.
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