Staff Software Engineer

Niantic’s mission is to use emerging technology to enrich our experiences as human beings in the physical world. We build products that inspire movement, exploration, and face-to-face social interaction. 

Niantic is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build the server infrastructure that supports projects such as Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom and Ingress. You will lead projects involving real-time indexing, querying and aggregation problems at massive scales of hundreds of millions of events per day. These technical challenges pertain to a single, coherent world-wide instance shared by millions of users.

We seek engineers with strong technical background, great execution, and self-starter mentality. The ideal candidate loves to jump into the unknown, clarify ambiguities, quickly learn from failures, and break down vague ideas into concrete tasks. 

Responsibilities

• Build and design reliable, high-throughput, low latency and scalable server and networking systems that support Niantic’s developers and products. 
• Build key components of the platform that developers can incorporate to create rich experiences in their games.
• Perform load testing, participate in code reviews, write unit tests, and conduct troubleshooting to ensure uptime for live systems.
• Collaborate with other specialists, product managers, and other departments to ensure code meets internal standards.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and coaching to junior engineers, fostering a culture of learning and collaboration.
• Drive code reviews, maintain high coding standards, and contribute to the continuous improvement of our development processes.
• Oversee the entire product release cycle, including QA testing, load testing, and the establishment of metrics, monitoring, and alerts.
• Collaborate with cross-functional team members and stakeholders, including regular and reliable attendance and participation in meetings.
• Required in-office 2 days on Wednesday and Thursday.

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• Minimum of 6 years of experience building reliable scalable platforms.
• Proficiency in one of the following languages: Java, Go or C with working knowledge of Python, SQL.
• Experience building networked and distributed systems. 
• Experience building concurrent and multi-threaded services. 
• Lead and deliver solutions with company-wide impact to production environments, and provided tools to monitor, support and mitigate any issues.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced hybrid environment and handle stress appropriately and/or ability to solve practical problems and be sufficiently adaptable to handle dynamic situations with little advance notice. 
• Experience working on cross-functional teams with ability to communicate effectively through written and verbal communications, including synchronous interactions with others.
• Involvement in high-level strategic planning that impacts overarching engineering initiatives.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and leading projects.

Plus If…

• Experience with deployment on hosting providers, such as Google Cloud, Azure or AWS.
• Experience with building ETL pipelines or  crafting data-related ingestion APIs.
• Familiarity with one or more open source projects, such as Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, ElasticSearch and Envoy. 
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (such as Terraform)

The total compensation package for this position includes a new hire offer base salary range of $226,600.00 - $265,000.00 bonus equity benefits.

Individual pay within this salary range is determined by work location and additional factors, including assessed job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can answer any questions about new hire total compensation during the hiring process. An overview of benefit offerings for your location can be found on the careers page.

Join the Niantic team!

Niantic's global-scale augmented reality platform and digital map powers spatial computing experiences in the real world. Incubated out of the Maps team at Google, Niantic first created Ingress and then Pokémon GO, a cultural phenomenon and hit game played by tens of millions of people each month. Niantic’s Lightship platform, which powers Pokémon GO, also supports the company's other games including Pikmin Bloom, Peridot and Monster Hunter Now. Developers use Niantic’s platform to build their own AR applications and experiences, either with the Lightship Platform or directly through the web with 8th Wall.

We believe that cultivating a workplace where our people are supported and included is essential to creating great products our community will love. Our mission emphasizes seeking and hiring diverse voices, including those who are traditionally underrepresented in the technology industry, and we consider this to be one of the most important values we hold close.

Niantic is a hybrid first company. We believe that in person interaction and collaboration fosters creativity, a sense of community, and is critical to our future success as a company. Our hybrid work schedules allow for a mix of remote and in-office work.

We're a hard-working, fun, and exciting group who value intellectual curiosity and a passion for problem-solving! We have growing offices located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Bellevue, Kansas, London, Tokyo, Hamburg, Hyderabad, and Zürich. #LI-HYBRID

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