Staff Software Engineer, Core

OneSignal is a leading omnichannel customer engagement solution, powering personalized customer journeys across mobile and web push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, and email. On a mission to democratize engagement, we enable over a million businesses to keep their users – including readers, fans, players and shoppers – engaged and up to date by delivering billions of messages daily.

1 in 5 new apps launches using OneSignal! We support companies in 140 countries, including Zynga, USA Today, Bitcoin.com, Eventbrite, Tribune, and many more – from startups and small businesses just getting off the ground to established companies communicating with millions of customers.

We’re Series C, venture-backed by SignalFire, Rakuten Ventures, Y Combinator, HubSpot, and BAM Elevate. We offer remote work as the default option in the United States in California, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Washington. As well as in the UK and Singapore – with plans to expand the locations we support in the future. Some roles are hybrid roles and will be listed as such. We have offices in San Mateo, CA and London, UK, and offer flex seating options for employees to work together in-person where we don’t have offices. Hiring in Singapore is done in partnership with a local PEO.

OneSignal has a lot of the great tech startup qualities you’d expect, but we don’t stop there. Our massive scale and small team, emphasis on healthy life balance and kindness in all our interactions, and focus on ownership and personal growth make OneSignal a uniquely great place to work.

About The Team

OneSignal has grown rapidly. Today we are serving billions of HTTP requests daily. We achieved this scale by leveraging bare metal cloud and writing scale-sensitive components in languages like Rust and Go. This potent combination of high-performance, low-cost hardware with efficient resource utilization has given us an incredible competitive edge.

The Core Services team enables product development at OneSignal through the design, development, and operations of cross-cutting horizontal services which form the backbone of our technical stack. This includes the delivery pipeline, responsible for delivering billions of push notifications, SMS, and emails every day, gRPC services written in Go and Rust, and Kafka consumers written in Rust. You will work with Rust, Go, Ruby, gRPC, Redis, Kafka, Scylla, PostgreSQL and Kubernetes.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll have the autonomy to take ownership of significant projects and directly impact our platform’s performance and features. Your expertise will shape the way businesses engage with their users. Working remotely, you’ll have the flexibility to create a schedule that works best for you, allowing you to excel professionally and personally.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate closely with fellow engineers to architect and implement services required to back OneSignal’s product offerings
• Help optimize a scaling strategy for our high performance Postgres and Scylla clusters
• Design and optimize schemas, queries, indices, caches and more across Postgres and Scylla
• Actively participate in peer code reviews and Technical Design Spec reviews, providing valuable technical insights to continuously improve our code base
• Work with the team to efficiently resolve production issues and ensure the system scales smoothly to meet the growing demands of our customers.
• Conduct data analysis and performance monitoring to identify areas for optimization and enhancement
• Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and technologies, incorporating new ideas into our engineering processes
• Participate in production on-call rotation
• Ability to work independently in uncertainty and drive multiple experiments to arrive at a solution to unblock business and customer operations
• Debug production issues by utilizing metrics, logs, and distributed traces
• Design synchronous and asynchronous APIs for communicating between services in a large distributed system

What You’ll Bring

• At least 8 years experience working as a software engineer
• Significant experience optimizing high performance databases such as Postgres, ScyllaDB, Cassandra or related at scale
• Experience operating reliable production systems at scale
• Easily bored running tasks by hand and the ability to automate such tasks
• Experience with distributed system event streaming framework such as Apache Kafka
• Experience with Rust, Golang or other lower level languages. Those with backgrounds in interpreted languages may have a steeper learning curve with Rust, but if you have worked on core components of very high throughput systems, please apply
• Ability to reason about how data flows through distributed systems
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

Required

We value a variety of experiences, and these are not required. It would be a added bonus if you have experience in any of the following:

• Experience with any of Redis, Kafka, ClickHouse, gRPC
• Experience profiling applications to improve performance in terms of time/CPU/memory
• Experience debugging issues in distributed systems

The New York and California base salary for this full time position is between $190,000 to $210,000. Your exact starting salary is determined by a number of factors such as your experience, skills, and qualifications. In addition to base salary, we also offer a competitive equity program and comprehensive and inclusive benefits.

Qualities We Look For

• Friendliness & Empathy
• Accountability & Collaboration
• Proactiveness & Urgency
• Growth Mindset & Love of Learning