Staff Software Engineer, SRE

BlockFi is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Site Reliability & Engineering Operations team!

About the Team

Do you enjoy maintaining highly available platform services and have a proven experience driving technical decisions with understanding how such changes can impact the clients and the internal applications teams?  If so, this is an opportunity you would not want to miss shaping the future of...

Come join our team and help us pioneer while building deep organizational relationships along the way. The SRE team manages all aspects of our production platform and ensures any new services are performant and reliable when run in production environments. You’ll work closely with the Development teams and the Infrastructure teams to optimize services and facilitate incident response as a part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) function. The ability to build a solid working relationship with our core product engineering team and others including compliance and legal is a must.

Your Mission

As a Staff Software Engineer in SRE you will tackle hands-on, high impact work as we develop a platform built for global scale. You will act as technical leader for a team, identify and define problems, design and implement technical solutions and tools, and mentor and teach more junior engineers. We are looking for proactive, collaborative, and adaptive engineers who have real world distributed systems experience at scale. 

• Architect/Design: 
  • Create architecture and formulate design decisions for your services which are aligned with business vision and meet quality criteria.
  • Work with diverse stakeholders to ensure our systems are built for availability, reliability, resilience, scalability, performance, and security from the ground up.
  • Write design proposals and review proposals from other engineers. Ensure tradeoffs are clearly and publicly documented.
• Deliver and Own Solutions: 
  • Responsible for creating and executing on plans and designs end to end at a team level: estimating, prototyping, implementing, testing, maintaining, debugging, and supporting high-quality software in production.
  • Work with stakeholders to understand and document both functional and quality attribute requirements.
  • Ensure that teams adhere to quality standards through cross-team communication, mentoring, code review, and backlog grooming.
  • Accountable for system availability and monitoring system health; ensure alerts, metrics, and runbooks are in place; and debug issues in production.
• Lead: 
  • Technical leader of a team, with significant technical and cultural impact beyond that team.
  • Guide engineers in focusing on outcomes and carefully considering business goals, tradeoffs, quality attributes, cross-cutting concerns, and risks.
  • Continuously improve engineering standards, processes, planning, solutions, and efficiency. 
  • Listen and guide debates to help reach a consensus. Once a decision is made, clearly communicate and support that decision.
• Adapt: 
  • Quickly learn new tools and technologies, develop an understanding of existing systems, and identify and tackle high impact work.
  • Proactively seek to learn about the company, products, processes, and culture. Align technical decisions with business goals.

Your Expertise

• Technical Breadth as well as Depth in Several Areas: 8 years of industry experience working with, designing, and building distributed systems at scale. Able to clearly identify, communicate, and document technical tradeoffs, and guides others to do the same.
• Technical Ownership: Experience owning software systems end-to-end, designing, estimating, implementing, testing, maintaining, debugging, and supporting high-quality software in production.
• Communication: Excellent communication, presentation and interpersonal skills. Able to listen and learn from as well as explain complex ideas to stakeholders of varying levels of technical expertise.
• Collaboration: Demonstrable experience with establishing strong relationships with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, integrating a variety of perspectives (end users, product, engineering, etc.). Empathetic and does the legwork required for building consensus. Always seeks out feedback on technical designs and solutions.
• Initiative and focus on outcomes: Prepared to take on high impact work across contexts and as the need arises, working independently and taking initiative while maintaining transparency and collaboration. Proactively identifies problems and comes to conversations with possible solutions. 
• Adaptive: Ability and motivation to quickly learn new languages, technologies and tools. Pragmatic bias toward outcomes, and technical decisions that solve real business problems.