Staff Engineer job opportunity at Path

[ch...@stackableregiments.com]

Hi folks!

We're long term devotees of Scala and Lift in particular, and are looking for a strong engineer to join our ranks!

This job is about helping to extend a proprietary middleware stack, based on Lift, in which processor steps run in a JavaScript serverside Rhino sandbox, enabling highly customisable business logic, with editing and tracking all done through the frontend in realtime.

My floor for this role is 130,000 USD and it's entirely work from home.

It does have a component of customer support, as it's the highest point on the US escalation chain before a phone call gets made to Melbourne, Australia to wake us up for a client issue.  This sort of support is usually leading a warroom to resolve an outage incident.

Mostly, though, it's writing interesting and beautiful code to support customers and internal team members in writing sandboxed JavaScript for systems integration.

Thanks for reading!

For convenience, here's the full job listing:

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We are an expanding portal provider in the tertiary education space, mostly serving customers in the United States. We are augmenting our US presence with a Staff Engineer to work from home.

An important part of our delivery model is working closely with customer IT teams, helping with project delivery and how to configure systems on their end.

We won't always have worked with these systems before, so there is a strong component of discovery, research and improvising in front of the customer.

The actual integration work takes place in our proprietary integration stack, a highly functional middleware built in Scala on the Lift framework.

This stack runs a streaming pipeline where transforms can be written in JavaScript, running on the server JVM in a sandboxed Rhino environment.

This JavaScript manipulates and uses sophisticated functionality surfaced from the underlying Scala infrastructure, with the whole system deployed in Docker+Kubernetes on AWS, with underlying datastores provided by Amazon Aurora.

Integration scopes cover Student Information Systems, Learning Management Systems and ersatz systems such as Emergency Broadcast Systems, mostly over well defined APIs and sometimes requiring negotiation of flat file based batch mechanisms.

We are opening this position to enhance the geographical resiliency of a team which is primarily based in Melbourne, Australia.

Hiring in the United States will give us rapid response capability and a triage point at a senior level. Authority and autonomy will be given to the Staff Engineer to resolve issues, communicate with clients, release patches and modify environments as required to resolve incidents in US business hours.

Incident response is a small proportion of this position's duty, however. The majority of time will be spent engineering and developing the middleware stack, writing pure Scala code and extracting code templates to form the basis of scripting recipes on which junior developers can base their work.

This is a fully remote, working from home position supervised from Australia by the Chief Engineer of the Flow system and with direct access to the Chief Technology Officer in a 40 person company which is staffed equally in the US and Australia.

To perform well, a candidate would have broad experience in both configuration and development spaces, understand the challenges of institutional application management and have a strong, calm presence when directing distributed troubleshooting.

Strong understanding of networks, the JVM and enterprise integration patterns will help significantly.

The ideal candidate will be able to trivially navigate Linux, operate safely on client provided batch files in XML, JSON or CSV and be able to spot check file structures and adherence to negotiated schemata.

Expertise in functional programming, threading primitives, script runtimes and API protocols such as SOAP, REST and JSON-RPC will be helpful.

Most of your time will be spent writing Scala integration operations and the customer configurations which make use of them.