Backend Engineer

We are looking for a backend engineer to join our application team.

You will monitor application performance and reports from our support staff to identify emerging pain points. You’ll trace these issues across the codebase and sometimes across multiple components to build a picture of what is going wrong, set up testbeds to recreate the issues, and propose solutions. In some cases you will implement improvements yourself; in others you’ll work with our platform team to get them implemented. And you’ll collect data after the improvements are deployed to validate their success.

In any given week you might be rewriting queries for efficiency, sorting out multi-process concurrency issues, improving observability, or tackling data integrity. To solve the technical challenges, you’ll need a solid understanding of computing principles, a wide range of experience and good technical intuition. At the same time, you’ll be working closely with peers in IT/ops and application development, and you’ll have to explain issues, possible solutions and results in ways that make sense to a variety of stakeholders.

Smartleaf is a Boston-based investment portfolio rebalancing service handling over $60 billion in assets. Our next milestone is doubling our capacity to handle 1 million accounts. In order to get to this next level of scale we need to evolve our architecture and you can have a big impact on how we do that. We need a teammate who will ramp up quickly and help us get things done. If you can bring skill, focus and tenacity to improving system performance and reliability, while being a genuinely nice person to work with, we want to talk to you.

A successful candidate:

• is a strong individual contributor who can independently assess requirements, propose a variety of solutions and follow through with implementation
• is able to dive into unfamiliar codebases and quickly build up working knowledge of how multiple components interact
• is tenacious in getting to the bottom of complicated problems
• has a habit of effectively gaining new skills to suit the task
• proactively builds tooling to make themselves more effective

Requirements:

• 3 years of experience
• Computer science degree or equivalent experience
• Experience building web applications (Ruby on Rails preferred)
• A strong foundation in application database programming: complex data models, SQL queries, transactions and concurrency issues
• Competence working in a linux environment: familiarity with common command-line utilities and unix process management; comfortable with bash scripting

We are a small team that works closely together and takes pride in providing a high level of service to our clients. Because we’re small, you’ll be able to work closely with teammates from many different business functions and there’s a lot of scope for people with an interest to stretch outside their comfort zone.

We prefer candidates who are willing to work in a hybrid environment. Candidates outside the Boston area should expect to travel to Boston several times in the first six months and 3x per year thereafter.

Our stack : Debian Linux, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails

This role reports to : Director of Software Engineering

This position is full-time exempt.

How to Apply:

Send your resume (PDF preferred) to future@smartleaf.com . Please include a brief note detailing what interests you in Smartleaf and why you might be a good fit for this role.

Please note : You must have a legal right to work in the United States; Visa sponsorship is not available at this time.

Smartleaf is an Equal Opportunity Employer.