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Job Category
Software Engineering
Job Details
Slack is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Desktop team within the Architecture & Systems organization. While most frontend roles focus on building user-facing features, this role is dedicated to building the Desktop Framework — the architectural foundation that underpins the Slack desktop client across all platforms. The team is heavily involved within the Electron open source project, ensuring the continued success and sustainability of the Electron ecosystem on behalf of Slack.
We are looking for an engineer who has deep expertise within Google's Chromium project, who is eager to lead cross functional efforts to uphold Slack security, performance, and stability within the web and desktop client. This engineer should love to keep up to date with the evolving capabilities of browser and desktop based development, be excited about the opportunity to increase developer efficiency and iterate on desktop security and development best practices alongside the rest of the Desktop and Frontend teams, and look forward to opportunities to collaborate across companies to align interests on a unified Electron vision.
Our success depends on working closely with other teams at Slack and at other companies, so communication and collaboration skills are a must. This is an opportunity to work on a team of skilled and impactful engineers that directly affects how Slack's desktop client is built.
What you will be doing:
- Strategic Leadership: You will lead cross functional initiatives across Electron and at Slack associated with increasing developer productivity, OS level stability, performance, or security alongside desktop and frontend stakeholders.
- Technical Standards: You will be contributing to key architectural decisions to adapt our existing frontend and desktop infrastructure to support new product features.
- Navigating Ambiguity: You will thrive in ambiguity, often identifying and offering solutions to problems, like framework migrations or rendering bottlenecks, that are not yet evident to the leaders who presented them.
- System Health: You will maintain and improve the core systems that power the Slack desktop client and Electron framework, including Slack and Electron-based infrastructure and tooling
- Mentorship & Culture: You will build a safe space for learning and serve as a skilled and trusted mentor to engineers across the organization, developing the ability to coach new leaders rather than just individual contributors.
- Cross-Functional Execution: You will collaborate with teammates across engineering to identify, define, and solve strategically important initiatives, acting as a leader in communication to de-escalate conflicts and drive consensus.
What you should have
- 10+ years of experience writing client-side code (React + Typescript) for modern web applications at scale.
- Deep Chromium experience, or experience contributing to large scale open source projects.
- Development at Scale: Experience working in a large-scale, shared codebase with hundreds of contributors, where you have successfully established patterns that allow other teams to contribute effectively without friction. Experience writing understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability and scalability.
- Strategic Architecture: Expertise in building complex systems and tooling, with the ability to lead technical design that guides the best decisions across the team.
- Business Alignment: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to tie technical infrastructure your work succinctly to company goals like performance, reliability and developer velocity. Routinely and facilitates dialogue between junior and senior members to surface blockers.
- Technical Breadth: Experience working with performance profiling and debugging tools for web based desktop applications. Familiarity with desktop development, along with the ability to understand and explain technical trade-offs and complexities.
- Self-Awareness: A commitment to proactively offering regular, constructive feedback and gracefully receiving it to improve yourself and the team culture.
- Eagerness to learn, but similar excitement to teach.
- Understanding that the perfect solution is informed by the people who will be building on your work, rather than being purely dependent on technical merits. Empathy is a feature.
Bonus Points
- Experience contributing to the engineering reputation externally (e.g., blog posts, speaking at conferences, open source contributions).
- Experience developing on Windows and maintaining build infrastructure for Windows desktop applications.
- Experience in fast-paced and dynamic product development environments.
Slack has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture — we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?
