Backend Engineer

Job description

On being a Backend Engineer at balena

We maintain a service infrastructure for IoT devices, and this is where we have quite a bit of our engineering talent. You will be actively working on one or more of these core components, fixing bugs, solving complex technical problems, and implementing user-facing features across the balena stack. While balena focuses on IoT, the majority of our engineers don't require embedded programming expertise.

People who are successful engineers are well-rounded generalists and great communicators. They are eager to take responsibility for a project, and are able to make good decisions about the project because they have the context of what's important.

We don't require engineers to be already familiar with the technologies we use. We are happy to invest in people that showcase a strong understanding of the challenges of building secure distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Actively invest back in our own technology, libraries, and frameworks
• Understand security best practices and strive to apply them in your work
• Be highly motivated to produce great code
• Evaluate customer requirements and other inputs to determine the scope and timing of new functionality
• Design, architect, and own the execution of your projects
• Ensure the architecture of our distributed system remains cohesive
• Collaborate, brainstorm, and coordinate work with our team
• Understand the high-level goals, and thus know how to prioritize your work
• Challenge orthodoxy when that will help the product evolve
• Work efficiently with a certain amount of ambiguity in the tasks you're executing

REQUIREMENTS

Need to have:

• Desire to make yourself and others more effective. You'd be bothered by an inefficient process
• Good understanding of software engineering practices and how to apply them
• Excellent written communication skills, and fluency in English
• Self-discipline to take on a project and push it to completion without too much management. You also know when to ask for help
• Strong problem-solving abilities. You know how to split a complex problem into incremental pieces
• Basic front-end development skills

Nice to have:

• A sample of your work (URL or attached sample)
• Contributions to OSS projects (please include a URL)
• Having worked remotely before
• Experience with balena as a user
• Experience with embedded GNU/Linux, anything ranging from personal projects with a Raspberry Pi to commercial or industrial scenarios with custom devices
• Experience with React, Node.js, Docker, PostgreSQL, or Kubernetes
• Experience with embedded development and microprocessors
• Experience with the Electron framework and cross-platform development
• Experience leading software projects in the open source world

Make sure to let us know if any of these items apply to you!

BENEFITS

• Work with an extremely talented, diverse team
• Equipment of your choice
• Remote-friendly
• Flexible working hours
• Flexible vacation policy
• Annual company gathering in an international location
• We send you hardware for side projects!