Senior Software Engineer (backend)

You’ll join the team primarily responsible for scaling the throughput and performance of the core, backend job processing engine at Tines. However, since we’re still a small but growing software engineering organization, this role is not strictly limited to any single part of our product or stack.

This role is about more than writing code: you'll have an influential voice in shaping our technical direction, our product, and our culture. We have a hugely supportive and collaborative engineering team that takes great pride in the work we do and the challenges we solve. We’re eager to help grow and nurture each other’s abilities and also create an environment where we have the ability to do our very best work.

Location:

You can work fully remotely from anywhere in Ireland. You can make use of our Tines office space in Dublin to meet up with other members of the engineering team when you wish.

In this role, you’ll:

• Work closely with colleagues to build the right solutions to the problems our customers face.
• Make valuable changes in our codebase in your first week, and see them live in production minutes after merging them.
• Shape how workflow execution happens at the very heart of our system, to help us power the world’s most important workflows.
• Write and review high quality, well tested code to ensure that we’re creating a stable product for our customers, and a stress-free codebase for ourselves.
• Identify areas for improvement, both in our codebase and in how we work, and share the responsibility of making our team better.
• Own the problems you’re solving - and the software you write to solve them - all the way to production and beyond, responding to customer feedback to improve those solutions.
• Use your knowledge to mentor other engineers in our team, providing support and guidance to help them grow their abilities.

Projects you might work on:

• Improve action throughput to meet our growing customers’ scale.
• Create internal and customer facing controls that allow Tines and our customers to configure job prioritization levels, ensuring the most critical workflows are executed in a timely manner.
• Optimize the storage and search of customers’ event data.
• Ensure jobs are executed in a balanced and fair manner, particularly on multitenant stacks.
• Enhance Tines' observability by introducing new features that empower customers to monitor the status and latency of their workflows and receive proactive alerts about potential issues.
• Write a blog post to share something interesting we learned with the community.

Is this role right for you?

• Roughly 7+ years as a professional software engineer. Proven track record of success as a senior software engineer. This is a senior role and we’re looking for candidates with a well of experience to draw from.
• You’ll need direct experience of building and delivering software using a high-level programming language. Our interview process includes a Byteboard exercise which involves adding features to a small command-line app, so you should feel very comfortable working at that level of technical complexity. You can use a language you’re comfortable with to complete the coding section.
• Your abilities matter, not your education or exactly where you’ve worked. We just need you to show us that you have accumulated the foundational skills and knowledge needed to succeed. Our main languages are Ruby and TypeScript, but you don’t have to be familiar with those - we value curiosity and an eagerness to learn. We’ll also cover the cost of education material to bring you up to speed.
• Cybersecurity knowledge isn’t required. We take application security seriously, but for this role you don’t need any experience in that area.
• This role is broad, not specialized. While your main focus will be on our backend job and event processing system, you’ll work right across our stack. You don’t need to have experience in all of these areas, but you will need to be excited to pitch in anywhere when needed, with the support of your teammates. This allows us to be more effective as a team, and provides a lot of opportunities for you to learn.
• We’re focused on the most important problems, not the most interesting ones. Your time and energy are limited, so in order to succeed you’ll need to spend it where it will make a difference. We view technologies as a means to an end, and stick to simple, common tools - Ruby, Rails, React, TypeScript, Postgres, Redis, AWS CDK, and Docker.
• We work healthily and sustainably. We work reasonable hours, we take our holidays and we plan our workloads realistically. No matter how excited we get by a project, it’s more important to not get burnt out from overwork.
• Your contributions will be obvious. On a small team like ours, you don’t have to spend a tonne of time and energy making sure your work is seen - your impact will be clear to everyone.
• We’re building an inclusive, supportive team. We have a wonderfully wide spectrum of colleagues at Tines, and we treat them all with kindness and respect - we expect that you will too. We don’t hire people that treat their colleagues badly, no matter how talented they are.
• We’re bringing programming to everyone. As software engineers, we can appreciate the power of using software to automate manual work. In our team, we get to use our knowledge to help bring this power to our customers, without them having to learn how to code.