Staff Software Engineer

About this role

Job Description: B12 's engineering team views software as a craft, but improving the world as the reason to practice it. Our engineers are responsible for prioritizing, conceptualizing, co-designing, building, testing, and engaging users for any concept we are building out. We’re generalists in encouraging each other to experience the full stack, but we’re also aware of each other’s preferences in the stack. For this role in particular, we’re searching for a tenured full-stack engineer who brings strong backend/infrastructure skills (and an interest in using them) to the product.

We mentor and teach where we can, both inside and outside of the company, and as a Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible not only for your ownership of major projects, but also mentorship of the team members with whom you ship those projects. We value sharing our work with the outside world. Our team has published papers on forming expert flash teams and machine-mediated worker hierarchies. We’ve baked our research into various open source tools in the space of creativity, expertise, and knowledge work.

We hope our engineers have more longevity than any one tool we use, but here is a sampling of our current thoughts about technology: We live on Python/Django and TypeScript/React. We store blobs in Amazon’s S3, munch on them in Amazon’s EC2, develop in Docker, and deploy containers to Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk. We believe PostgreSQL should be the first system you consider when thinking about persisting structured data.

We clean and centralize data in Amazon’s Redshift, and are able to answer almost any question in SQL. We leverage AI in our product and our internal tooling, and faced with a landscape in constant flux, try to pick the right model or agent on a task-by-task basis. Our new code is almost 100% LLM-generated, and we’ve thought hard about ensuring quality in the face of ever-increasing review loads, what processes humans are still best at, and how the practice of mentorship must adapt in the face of these new tools.

We have near-full test coverage on the backend, and are making progress on our frontend and integration tests. We set up continuous integration and deployment because, while this model comes with its own pains, we’ve disliked being on fixed release schedules on previous projects. We like to move fast and support point-in-time recovery :). You’d be a good fit if You have 10 or more years of experience building products and systems in production.