Staff Software Engineer – Thinkific / Thinktific

Are you passionate about advocating for Engineering best practices, helping team members level up, and acting as a force multiplier in your teams? We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join us at Thinkific.

As a Staff Software Engineer within our Fundamentals group at Thinkific, you are accountable for some of the shared software and systems within our backend architecture and database. Reporting into the Engineering Manager, you’ll work closely with Principal Engineers, and Architects to guide the technical direction of large projects while also investing time to coach and mentor other Engineers on the team.

Your goal will be to help guide and execute on projects related to our backend architecture. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:

• Contribute to the technical strategy for the backend stack and data architecture, helping the business make technical decisions by including providing high level technical estimates, options, and feasibility opinions
• Demonstrate a deep awareness of how changes you make interact with all components in a broader system. This includes technologies for frontend, backend, infrastructure, usability, and design, as well as varying development, testing, and release methodologies within an organization
• Work closely with the Engineering Manager to provide technical leadership for  roadmaps, manage execution of projects, and support the team’s overall planning process
• Perform as an individual contributor on major technical roadmap items, while mentoring and providing valuable feedback to other engineers on the team
• Advocate for Engineering best practices by sharing knowledge, teaching others new skills, and contributing to improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has 5+ years of experience working in a senior engineering role, and is an expert in backend architectural approaches such as event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, and multi-tenant systems
• Understands and is proficient in multiple backend languages, such as Ruby, Golang, or Node and also has expert-level knowledge of relational and non-relational database technologies such as Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB
• Is experienced with asynchronous job processing, using queuing technologies such as SNS, SQS, and Sidekiq
• Loves to learn and grow. They’ve found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that’s through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:

• Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and streaming technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Kinesis
• An understanding of how to work with  infrastructure as code technologies, such as Terraform
• Experience with containers and orchestration via Docker and Kubernetes

This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview process for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.