Back-End Engineer - Microservices

About Us

We are on a mission to maximize humanity’s potential by enabling better education. Our company is venture-backed and is based in Silicon Valley. Our founders are former Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn engineering and product leaders. We are building revolutionary products for teachers and students, and are fortunate to have many raving fans.

Overview of the role

We're seeking experienced and detail-oriented Backend Engineers to build and manage microservices that power the Pencil Spaces product, ensuring high performance and reliability. You have sharp coding skills and thrive in the dynamics of a fast-paced environment. In this role, you’ll partner directly with the Backend Engineering leader and deliver new Backend capabilities at scale.

Responsibilities:

Design service side APIs and logic to service Product requirements.

Writing reusable, testable, and efficient code.

Design and implementation of low-latency high-availability, and performant services. Cognizant of resource utilization and cost reduction for these services.

Implementation of security and data protection.

Integration of data storage solutions including databases, key-value stores,
blob stores, etc.

Deliver on individual project priorities, deadlines and milestones with your
technical expertise.

Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders.

Work with the Product Manager for judging feasibility of product plans, product mocks, customer requests and external services, and provide estimates with support from the area lead.

Desired Qualifications

Our stack: MEAN hosted on GCP with a bunch of microservices and Firebase.

Strong understanding of Node.js (preferred), or Python.

Understanding of microservices architecture on GCP (or other public clouds). Ability to create, monitor, debug, and patch services that scale to thousands of concurrent users.

Understanding accessibility and security compliance.

Experience with databases systems like MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis

Familiarity with Data migration, transformation, and scripting.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience designing large and scalable backend infrastructure such as API servers exposing multiple RESTful / websocket based APIs. Ideally, we’re looking for experience supporting concurrent processing via sharding and synchronization across multiple instances, with fault tolerance and scalability in terms of traffic and storage.

Proficient understanding of most cloud technologies, via either PaaS such as App Engine, Kubernetes and Docker or cloud VM’s.

Experience optimizing critical queries in the retrieval stack. Experience with improving latency and reliability of backend query traffic via caching/other parallelization policies.

Strong understanding of monitoring and logging requirements for backend systems, and setting up streaming logs for easy monitoring and alerting for failures and exceptions.

Hands-on experience with designing high throughput MongoDB schemas that are flexible enough for high velocity development amid changing requirements.

Expertise in developing complex aggregation pipelines and debugging them.

This is a great opportunity to make a massive dent in an important and big space, while having lots of fun
and learning a lot working with some awesome people.
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We look forward to getting to know you! Let’s Better Education!

Interested? Please email hiring@pncl.tech