Staff Software Engineer, Backend

The journey that awaits you

As Staff Software Engineer, you will work closely with your fellow engineers, your Engineering Manager and members of the Product team to deliver top notch software as part of a rapidly-growing company.

Some tools we currently use include Ruby, Rails, React, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes and various AWS Serverless components. More important than any tool is our relaxed yet challenging working environment. Our small engineering teams of 3–5 people are encouraged to solve their own problems with a great degree of freedom, to see their work through to completion and to take pride in – and full ownership of – the applications they work on.

As a Staff engineer you will provide architectural and design direction for your team, and at the same time hold yourself responsible for the pace and quality of your own work. This is a practical role where you will need to roll up your sleeves and dig in – we like to plan our work meticulously, but we are not large enough to maintain any hands-off engineering positions. You will find plenty of opportunities for career development, personal growth and technical problem solving as part of an upbeat, optimistic team of engineers who share your enthusiasm for open and empathetic communication.

A Staff Engineer at Latana is the glue between different product and engineering functions, actively mentoring and sponsoring colleagues, and showing an unmatched degree of dedication and professional pride. You will assist in setting the medium- to long-term technical direction of the company, and will be expected to balance short term gain („just ship something“) against ideal solutions, and to know how to trend towards the latter, even when working at pace.

Your skills and expertise

• Proven expertise with Ruby and with the Ruby on Rails framework, as well as proficiency with at least one other programming language
• Expert understanding of relational databases, experience with high traffic load projects
• You are highly experienced with cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services/Google Cloud/Microsoft Azure and are happy to work with our cloud provider of choice, AWS
• A full stack skillset: Linux administration, Git, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, database administration, understanding of queuing systems, caching systems and monitoring/observability tools
• An excellent command of written and spoken English
• Cleanliness in your work – you set the standard for well-documented pull requests that can be understood by your colleagues, and you document the higher level behaviour of your applications
• You take pride in testing your code whilst understanding the trade-offs that need to be made in some testing circumstances
• Ability to lead others – this is not a people management role, but you are nonetheless comfortable driving projects forward with your technical decision making and strong communication skills

Your character

• You have a pragmatic, polyglot approach – you use the best tool for the job
• You understand that proactive verbal and written communication is a large part of software engineering
• You maintain a high understanding of how your work relates to the goals of the company
• You are enthusiastic about solving problems and motivated to help the people around you succeed
• You always keep the big picture in mind when focusing on one part of the system
• You have an automate-everything approach – streamlining processes and eliminating manual work excites you!
• You are a lifelong learner – you follow movements in software development and continually improve your skills, and your enthusiasm for software development is still as strong as ever
• You prefer collaborative work over working alone – team success is important to you
• You use your years of experience to raise the team higher, but you are humble enough to accept that you can always learn something new from your more junior colleagues

These skills and characteristics describe our ideal candidate for the role. Nonetheless we encourage candidates who don’t meet 100% of these requirements to apply – highly motivated people with varying backgrounds and experiences can grow into this role. If you’re missing one or two requirements in your employment history but you are driven to help Latana succeed, we want to hear from you!