Senior Platform Backend Developer - Hootsuite, Vancouver

About this opportunity

Hootsuite is seeking a Senior Platform Backend Developer to join its Backend Platform team in Vancouver, British Columbia. This critical role involves supporting the entire development organization to deliver exceptional value to customers in a reliable, efficient, and secure manner. You will be part of a focused team that owns key pieces of the production application environment and the developer experience, driving quarterly goals and contributing to the evolution of the platform.

Your primary focus will be on developing services and tools for product development teams, as well as modernizing the existing platform. The team leverages a diverse technology stack, including Go, Scala, and PHP, alongside expertise in Kafka, various AWS services, and infrastructure-as-code tools. You will report to the Senior Manager, Software Development, DevOps.

What you'll do

• Design and build software, including tools, libraries, automation, services, and glue scripts.
• Take responsibility for the reliability, security, and integrity of Hootsuite's large, cloud-based platform.
• Participate in a flexible on-call rotation to ensure system stability.
• Lead projects by owning milestones, epics, or features.
• Contribute to continuous improvement, shaping the culture, processes, and direction within your team and across the department.
• Develop processes and automation to eliminate repetitive tasks.
• Design and build the core infrastructure platform.
• Identify and implement new platform features to enhance functionality.
• Research and evaluate new technologies to drive innovation.
• Refactor, rewrite, or retire existing platform features as needed.
• Operate Hootsuite's developer experience and production application environments.
• Diagnose and repair distributed systems efficiently.
• Perform maintenance, upgrades, and migrations to keep the platform current.
• Control or eliminate repetitive tasks, alert noise, and business-as-usual work.
• Enable development teams by providing executable interfaces to the infrastructure platform.
• Provide tools and best practices to support the entire software development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with colleagues across the organization to solve problems and build better processes, systems, and software.
• Communicate effectively through mentoring, writing documentation, participating in meetings, and sharing work at demos.

Qualifications

• A degree in Computer Science or Engineering.
• At least 5 years of experience in an SRE, DevOps, or software engineering role with a track record of substantial contributions to software projects with high business impact.
• Experience with mentoring, coaching, and pairing with coworkers.
• Experience writing clean code that performs well at scale and an understanding of SaaS software development practice; ideally, experience working on a SaaS product.
• Experience using infrastructure-as-code tools to build and run cloud infrastructure.
• Optional: Experience with operating, building, and maintaining cloud infrastructure and a working knowledge of Linux systems administration, including troubleshooting system-level issues, networking (L3-L7), and basic monitoring is preferred.
• Demonstrated collaboration and teamwork skills, prioritizing group needs over individual needs.
• A creative and innovative mindset, seeking new and better ways of doing things.
• Strong problem-solving abilities, using a logical approach to find solutions to complex problems.
• Resilience and tolerance for change/ambiguity, effectively coping with change to advance work and projects.