Principal Engineer (Backend)

Saltside is the provider of leading classified sites in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Ghana, with about 600 employees. Our development organization is 100% remote with employees in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Sweden. Saltside is a truly diverse company with team members from many parts of the world. You’ll be stepping into a context with many different cultures, perspectives and a lot of individual responsibility and ownership.
Currently we are looking to fill a position for a Principal Engineer, Backend. Which is a position where you will be technical owner for our backend. You will be setting long term goals and working with other engineers on designing technical implementations. In this role you will also mentor and train others about best practices and raise the bar of engineering continuously.

Nerd facts

In this role you’ll find yourself in the core of the technology stack at Saltside. The back end is largely written in Go, Ruby and some Node.js. On the data store side we use MongoDB, DynamoDB and MySQL. For caching we use Redis primarily, but also some memcached. Our search engine is powered by Elasticsearch.
Our infrastructure and development is heavily invested in Docker and we strongly believe in writing scalable software that is the same for all environments.
You will own a lot of decisions for how features are implemented, how they fit in our micro services architecture and what technologies are best suited to solve the problem at hand.
We don’t expect you to know all technologies - what is important is that you can demonstrate that you are interested and able to pick up new things on the run.

Who are you?

Engineers come in many different shapes, and we are open to everyone. At Saltside, who you are is important - but never limiting. Our team represents people of different origin, sex, religion and beliefs and our mission is simple; we want to create sustainable value to underserved markets.
Whether you have an academic background or just a lot of experience is less important to us, what we are interested in is someone with a good track record in similar positions. To be successful in this role you likely have at least 8+ years experience as an engineer and we think that you have touched many different technologies along the way. Scalability and resilience is key to us and we’re using AWS and containers to help with that, so experience in these areas is meriting.
We also expect you to bring good work ethics, a lot of smarts and fun to the table. Saltside values engineers with strong opinions on how to best write software.
It’s a plus if you have worked in remote organizations previously as our development organization is fully remote.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable software in a number of languages (we don’t expect you to know all of them upfront); Go, Ruby and Node.js
• Set long term architectural / technical goals for the platform and get buy-in for your ideas
• Design feature implementations across our microservices architecture
• Mentor and train other engineers & provides guidance on implementation strategies
• Advocate and adopt best engineering practices and designs for feature development or technology exploration projects
• Help with feature delivery, bug finding and similar activities
• It’s great if you have experience with both relational and SQL and NoSQL preferably MongoDB/DynamoDB
• Champion the practice of Test Driven Development and Unit Testing