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Job Details

About the Opportunity:

We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. Our team maintains and builds performant services that that include:

• Edge Caches
• Enterprise Key Management
• International Data Residency
• Image Uploads, Downloads, and Proxying

We’ve done our job correctly when none of our users think about us, much like a vital utility. We don’t typically ship new user-facing features, but rather ensure our systems are exceptionally performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable. In other words, we make Slack work seamlessly. Slack's backend services are written in Go and Java, and Slack's API is built on PHP/Hack.

The Distributed Data Services Team

We are a small team building critical services that enable Slack to scale for our largest customers. Our edge caches power the most latency critical queries for our largest entities today. Our other services power Slack’s Enterprise Key Management and Data Residency features.
We power core Slack functionality such as shared channels, our privacy-preserving image proxy, and many other key day-to-day parts of our customer’s experience. We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability are the foundations of our work.
We are actively building the future of edge services at Slack, so we can support a growing number of globally distributed customers with their compliance requirements with minimal latency.

What you will be doing:

• Design, build, ship and maintain the Edge caching services that serves ~35% of all of Slack's API traffic and is critical to Slack’s core functionality.
• Collaborate with peers in Engineering to triage bugs and fix sophisticated production issues across the stack related to our services.
• Write code to automate maintenance and reduce the need for manual intervention
• Review code and get your code reviewed, mentor and be mentored by other engineers
• Design and build solutions to improve the reliability and resilience of our services
• Write, review, or provide feedback on a technical design proposal
• Have an operational responsibility in addition to being a software developer. You will participate in the team's on-call rotation, assist with triaging and addressing production issues, and respond to incidents.

What you should have:

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field/ equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.
• Experience building large-scale systems professionally for 6+ years and can point to things you’ve worked on.
• Experience managing critical production infrastructure, maintaining reliability and uptime, and having a customer first view of operational safety.
• Experience with reliable, safe distributed systems and an understanding of engineering and product trade-offs, and how to make a case for either.
• Experience with working on complex issues where the analysis requires an in-depth knowledge of the company and existing architecture.
• Experience with writing unit tests, code review, design documentation, debugging, and troubleshooting. You've been developing and operating web applications professionally and can talk at length to things you and your teams have built
• A curious, inquisitive, and determined mindset to fix things when they break.
• US Citizen or Green Card holder

Bonus points:

• Experience with the Go programming language
• Experience with AWS
• Experience building and releasing software using Docker containers
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience working within highly regulated environments where an understanding of FEDRAMP/NIST frameworks were essential

Distributed Data Services is a diverse and inclusive team that is building the future of Slack’s infrastructure. We are happy to help you learn what you need to know; we encourage and support each other’s growth and it’s not expected that you would have expertise across all of these areas from the beginning.