Principal Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems

Principal Backend Engineer – Distributed Systems

Cambridge, MA

About this position:

Context Labs is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to help drive forward our product initiatives with our Immutably™ Platform and analytics spaces. Working as a leader within the development team, the engineer will lead many aspects of developing our distributed ledger services, APIs, and related product capabilities; as well as provide thought leadership, upskilling of less senior engineers, and taking part in defining strategic linkages across the company’s products.

In this role you will:

• Lead the Scrivener & Trust services engineering team as a technical authority.
• Develop and maintain distributed ledger APIs and services for use within the Immutably™ Platform.
• Collaborate with other development teams and the product owner to define and estimate business requirements and then translate these into specific software tasks.
• Lead hands-on software development of Scrivener and related projects using multiple (minimally JVM) languages.
• Provide exemplary code, structure, design, etc. for the platform services team to use as guidelines.
• Document designs, architecture, and code.
• Conduct code reviews.
• Head technical talks on a variety of issues.
• Design and implement performant, scalable, and maintainable solutions.
• Collaborate as a member of an agile team to get products developed and completed with best-in-class software development.
• Coach and mentor members of your team through the variety of technological, and methodological challenges they face day-today.
• Coordinate across a distributed team spanning multiple time zones.
• Anything else as may reasonably be required by the company.

Experience & Skills:

• Full-stack development
• Demonstrated proficiency in distributed systems and consensus algorithms
• End-to-end understanding of modern application architectures
• Big picture orientation with strong attention to detail
• Proficiency in unit and functional testing
• Great communication skills
• Demonstrated proficiency in peer-to-peer systems and other networking architectures
• Demonstrated proficiency in one or more distributed ledgers and one or more smart contract languages
• Strong understanding of cryptographic principles, including hashing, digital signatures, and encryption techniques.
• Experience in implementing security best practices to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of persistent data.
• Experience implementing Event Sourcing, CEP and/or CQRS
• Experience with protocols such as RAFT, BFT, Gossiping, DHT, and or CRDT
• Experience with databases such as Apache CouchDB, Cockroach DB, Foundation DB, and Kafka
• Experience with disparate Java frameworks such as Spring/Quarkus/Helidon etc.
• Proficiency with Docker based microservice architectures and the Kubernetes platform.
• Proficiency with MySQL, PostgreSQL, or equivalent RDBMS
• Experience with NoSQL/NewSQL databases.
• Proficiency in source code management

Preferred Experience:

• Experience with functional programming
• Experience with languages other than Java (Rust, Go, Erlang, Zig, C etc.)
• Experience doing development on technologies such as: Streambase, Voldemort, Accumulo, Aerospike, VoltDB and or Kafka.
• A bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field

Why you’ll like it here:

• Context Labs is collaborative at its core. You’ll work within your team and across the organization allowing for continuous learning and discovery.
• We set goals that matter and provide value in all that we do, from building meaningful products to positively impacting carbon reduction and climate change.
• Context Labs’ mission is to transform complex data into continuously proven information. Powered by Immutably™, an innovative, trusted data fabric platform, our integrated solutions deliver context-driven insights that enable human networks to spot patterns, correlate trends - and reveal the ground truth hidden inside the world’s most complicated, persistent problems.

We understand that applying for a job can be intimidating. Applicants rarely meet every single job requirement, and we know there are many skills and backgrounds that will contribute to success in this role. If you’re interested in applying, please do so.

Context Labs embraces diversity and equal opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe the more inclusive we are, the better our products will be. Context Labs will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please contact Human Resources at HR@contextlabs.com.

Who we are:

Context Labs is dedicated to sourcing, organizing, and contextualizing the world’s climate information. The company enables data to become trusted, shared, and utilized as Asset Grade Data (AGD™), providing insights and solutions to inform markets. Context Labs mission is to provide the world’s trusted data fabric platform, delivering Asset Grade Data to customers using the Immutably™ Enterprise Data Fabric platform, deploying machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, and cryptographic blockchain technologies, for context-driven insights.

Building on the Immutably™ Enterprise Data Fabric platform, the company has deployed customer service layers (1) Decarbonization-as-a-Service™ (DaaS™), tailored to accelerate the Global Energy Transition, and its (2) CLEAR Path™ platform to enable customers to optimize value creation with the highest quality carbon credits. The company was formed out of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) research and is comprised of a leadership team that has been instrumental in the at-scale growth of the Internet, in prior companies. The company has offices in Amsterdam, Cambridge, Mass., and Houston.

We are a team that is hiring and growing! Learn more about Context Labs here:

www.contextlabs.com