Staff software engineer

Job Description:

B12's engineering team views software as a craft, but improving the world as the reason to practice it. Our engineers are responsible for prioritizing, conceptualizing, co-designing, building, testing, and engaging users for any concept we are building out. We’re generalists in encouraging each other to experience the full stack, but we’re also aware of each other’s preferences in the stack. For this role in particular, we’re searching for a tenured full-stack engineer who brings strong backend/infrastructure skills (and an interest in using them) to the product. We mentor and teach where we can, both inside and outside of the company, and as a Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible not only for your ownership of major projects, but also mentorship of the team members with whom you ship those projects.

We value sharing our work with the outside world. Our team has published papers on forming expert flash teams and machine-mediated worker hierarchies. We’ve baked our research into various open source tools in the space of creativity, expertise, and knowledge work.

We hope our engineers have more longevity than any one tool we use, but here is a sampling of our current thoughts about technology:

• We live on Python/Django and TypeScript/React.
• We store blobs in Amazon’s S3, munch on them in Amazon’s EC2, develop in Docker, and deploy containers to Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk.
• We believe PostgreSQL should be the first system you consider when thinking about persisting structured data.
• We clean and centralize data in Amazon’s Redshift, and are able to answer almost any question in SQL.
• We leverage AI in our product and our internal tooling, and faced with a landscape in constant flux, try to pick the right model or agent on a task-by-task basis.
• Our new code is almost 100% LLM-generated, and we’ve thought hard about ensuring quality in the face of ever-increasing review loads, what processes humans are still best at, and how the practice of mentorship must adapt in the face of these new tools.
• We have near-full test coverage on the backend, and are making progress on our frontend and integration tests.
• We set up continuous integration and deployment because, while this model comes with its own pains, we’ve disliked being on fixed release schedules on previous projects.
• We like to move fast and support point-in-time recovery :).

You’d be a good fit if:

• You have 10 or more years of experience building products and systems in production.
• You are an amazing communicator.
• You feel comfortable managing your time and deciding among competing priorities.
• You are curious.
• You have a high ownership mentality.
• You enjoy learning and teaching.
• You are comfortable working with backend and frontend technologies, but have a deeper background and interest on the backend/infrastructure side.
• You care about and want to contribute to our mission of helping people do meaningful work.

What does a staff engineer do here?

This is B12’s first Staff Engineer hire on a ~10-person product team that includes a designer, product manager, and CTO. To understand what we’re looking for in someone with this much experience, here are some concrete examples of tasks you’d work on in a month:

• Own the delivery of a project of the magnitude “we ship one or two of these a quarter,” both individually shipping code and rallying and supporting team members in doing so.
• Participate in quarterly planning to identify key projects to work on next quarter.
• Mentor other engineers who are in the planning, prototyping, or implementation phases of a project.
• Respond to an incident, write up a postmortem, and improve tooling and infrastructure to help us prevent or more quickly respond to the issue and others like it in the future.
• Identify and optimize some infrastructure that costs too much, is too slow, or isn’t stable enough.
• Discuss an early design/prototype with a designer or product manager to help shape its direction and explain what will be easy or hard to implement.
• Unblock an operational team member on a data analysis project that answers a hairy question facing our business.
• Run a brainstorm with engineers to identify how we might work more effectively or ship with a higher level of quality.

Don’t fear:

We highly favor talent and interest. Some candidates may see this list and feel discouraged because they don’t match all the items. Please apply anyway: there’s a good chance you’re more wonderful than you think you are.

B12 is a safe place for human beings. We particularly encourage you to apply if you identify as a woman, are a person of color or other underrepresented minority, or are a member of the LGBTQIA community.