Staff Software Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead and set an example for our engineering teams. As a staff engineer you will take on the technical leadership of our products and services, setting an example for your team to follow and sharing best practices in all technical domains. You will have impact across multiple teams as you set standards and ways of working, making important technical decisions on projects and services that will directly impact hundreds of thousands of users.

You’ll be an expert in at least one technical domain, and engineers across the organisation will consult you for advice. You’ll be given the space to take a long-term view in your technical decisions, and will spend time working on improving the team processes, practices, tools and ways of working, working on your team, as well as in your team.

We work hard to make sure that the Foundation is a place where everyone is supported to do the best work of their careers. We have a flexible and collaborative approach to all aspects of our work. If you're the right person for the job, we’ll make it work for you, and you can be confident that you’ll be joining an exceptional team of people who care about our mission and each other.

Responsibilities

• Act as technical lead on the foundation’s various projects and services
• Write code that serves as an example of best practice in security, accessibility, performance and robustness to the rest of your team.
• Propose and implement architectural solutions to solve the Foundation's technical challenges, building highly scalable and robust web applications and systems
• Set an example for the members of your delivery team and across the engineering organisation, leading by example through code reviews, writing secure and scalable code, and by following a test-driven approach
• Share your knowledge proactively through the mentoring and coaching of senior engineers
• Accelerate delivery teams and projects through finding practical solutions to blocking technical issues and defining an effective development process
• Be accountable for the quality of the code for your team, with ownership of the technical aspects and architecture of key projects.
• Continuously improve quality in your work and support others to do the same, providing technical and architectural support to other delivery teams
• Define and own the technical operations of your team’s products and services
• Articulate technical decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders, with a clear focus on user needs and business value.

We recognise that everyone has the potential for growth. We welcome applications from candidates who can demonstrate that they have some, but not necessarily all, of the experience and personal attributes listed here. We also welcome applicants from non-traditional backgrounds, such as those returning to work, leaving military service, or having recently changed careers.

You will have a significant focus on continuous improvement, proactively acting on opportunities to improve the technology, toolings and ways of working around you. You will have worked directly with non-technical stakeholders, gathering requirements and coordinating with other teams. You have experience leading other engineers and implementing best engineering practices in an Agile Environment.

Experience and Personal Attributes

You should have:

• Experience developing engineering talent through mentoring and coaching.
• Led complex technical delivery projects in an Agile environment.
• In depth knowledge of Ruby on Rails, Node.js/Express or front end web frameworks (such as React) and significant experience with RDBMS (such as PostgreSQL).
• Deep technical expertise and excellent troubleshooting and debugging skills, including in debugging opaque distributed system issues without clear causal chains.
• Experience optimising the performance of distributed systems. Including instrumenting services for performance metrics, monitoring performance and using the insights gained to design performant systems.
• A track record of implementing proactive security tooling techniques, measures and practices.
• A proven track record of architecting and managing infrastructure on platforms such as Heroku, Cloudflare, and AWS, using tools and services such as Terraform and CircleCI.
• Experience collaborating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to gather requirements and define elegant technical solutions.
• An in-depth knowledge of engineering patterns and standards.
• Experience writing documentation for a variety of technical and non-technical audiences, including specifications, architecture proposals, Request for
• Experience appropriately communicating technology decisions to a variety of stakeholders.
• Experience disseminating Agile ways of working and best practices across teams and organisations.