Senior Software Engineer

You probably haven’t run into a company like Olark before.

We are 40 people distributed around the globe working together to fundamentally change the way people communicate with businesses. We care deeply about customer service which is reflected in our All Hands Support model. Our passion and dedication for our over 10,000 customers is a direct result of our people centric org model.

You will play a pivotal role in our engineering culture by contributing to our positive organization and fulfilling our company goals.

Please note this is a fully remote role based anywhere in the United States or Canada.

Your primary responsibilities will be:

• Build and design backend applications: You will participate in the design and implementation of highly available backend applications. Your work and decisions will help support our products and give our customers the best experience possible.
• Participate in a small team environment: You will work in collaboration on a team with members from diverse disciplines. You will help guide the development cycle using your technical understanding of the systems, participating in code reviews as a contributor as well as a reviewer. As a Senior Engineer, you will provide guidance and recommendations to teammates and product owners.
• Customer Support: Every member of our team spends at least one day per month supporting our customers via Olark chat itself. You'll get a chance to talk directly to our customers and get first hand experience using our product!

You will help us solve key engineering challenges:

Olark is a live chat SaaS which is loaded on thousands of webpages by millions of users across the Internet every day. Our chat box must run on any website, in any modern browser, delivering messages in real time with maximal reliability. We practice continuous delivery on systems which may process thousands of requests per second or terabytes of data.

Our software infrastructure runs on a cloud environment composed of hundreds of servers in a microservice-oriented architecture. We primarily use Python, but we are not bound to any single language or technology; we use the best tools available whenever possible.

Your role will include:

• Rapid prototyping of new features and products to drive growth and delight our customers
• Building efficient and elegant communication channels across our infrastructure
• Leveraging a corpus of more than a hundred million conversations to suggest actions to chat agents in real time
• Integrating Olark with other services which will benefit our customers
• Building systems that are secure by design, to protect the data integrity and safety of all our users
• Modernizing existing systems, performing Python 2 to 3 migrations, and containerizing processes for execution in Kubernetes
• Scaling our production deployment automatically to handle spikes in traffic

Your technical background and experience:

• Very familiar with backend development and web technologies: You have familiarity with networking, datastores, optimization and distributed systems. You’ve used command line tools to debug networking issues, know the difference between processes and threads, and understand the challenges of building software in the cloud.
• Meticulous attention to detail: You should be able to review code written by other engineers and find room for improvement. You should have experience writing thorough unit tests that exercise your code so we can catch problems before they affect our customers. Every time we push out new code is an opportunity to delight thousands of customers (or a risk of making a bad day for those people).
• Write quality code: You should have examples of code you have written that is easy to read, maintainable, and testable. You should be able to decompose complicated problems into elegant solutions anyone on the engineering team can understand. You are happy to receive constructive criticism on your work, and actively seek it out.
• Always learning: You are excited to learn our tech stack, and to help lead it forward. You’re comfortable making the right call when it comes to choosing between new technologies and industry proven standards.
• Significant production experience: You have experience shipping and maintaining production code that is used by thousands of people. You have run into the edge cases of operating at scale, and with your experience, you can help us avoid these pitfalls.

You:

• Self-directed, but also open to collaboration: You are happy to work independently, but know when to ask for help. You know how to give, and receive, direct feedback. You are a team player and comfortable contributing to projects as well as open to leading projects. You deal well with ambiguity and realize it is an opportunity to experiment.
• Excellent communicator: You are able to clearly communicate your thoughts, especially in text based communication. You know when a conversation should be in chat, or face-to-face via video call.
• Empathetic: You realize listening is just as important as speaking your mind. You assume good faith of your teammates when there is conflict and are curious about understanding their perspectives.
• Comfortable or open to working remotely: Majority of your team will be distributed and you’ll communicate via remote tools: email, chat, video conferencing, etc.

You can expect a lot from us:

First off, make sure to read about our team culture at olark.com/jobs, and our values at olark.com/values. You can also get a sense of our history at olark.com/10000. Beyond what you see there, as a member of the engineering team you can expect:

• A great remote culture and team: Even though we’re separated our team makes the effort to connect to one another and we provide in person opportunities to meet up. We genuinely like each other.
• A life outside of work: Olarkers generally work 40 hour weeks. Work is a marathon, not a sprint. We are building a company for the long haul.
• Quality-driven culture: we strive to automate testing and heavily monitor our production system. Our goal is ensuring that any end-user issues are short-lived and limited in scope.
• We value your time to do focused work: We have one weekly required engineering meeting and a team wide sync. We appreciate and take advantage of the time we have to get in sync, but we also deeply value and respect our time to think and do focused work.

Olark is committed to diversity in its workforce. Olark is an equal employment opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants without regard to gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, veteran or disability status.

Desired Skills

• Kubernetes

Contact Info

• Company Website: http://www.olark.com/