Senior Software Engineer, Back-End (Content)

Muck Rack is the leading SaaS platform for public relations and communications professionals. Our mission is to enable organizations to build trust, tell their stories and demonstrate the unique value of earned media. Muck Rack’s Public Relations Management (PRM) platform enables PR teams to work together to find the right journalists for their stories, send customized pitches, build meaningful relationships with the media, monitor news, and quantify their impact.

Founder controlled, fully distributed, and growing sustainably, Muck Rack has received several awards for its unparalleled culture and product from organizations like Inc., G2, and BuiltIn. We value resilience, transparency, ownership, & customer devotion and infuse these values into everything we do.

We’re looking for a collaborative and self-motivated Senior Software Engineer, Back-End to join our quickly growing team and make a big impact.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Content Team, you’ll work closely with software engineers, product managers, and designers, to ensure that the content available to our customers meets their expectations.  You’ll work on major technical projects with large data volumes, lead the building of new features, and help shape our engineering culture and processes. Our engineers are not siloed to any particular part of the application–everyone contributes everywhere. Our tech stack includes Python, Django, Celery, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Vue, and Webpack. Our technology team is focused on scale, quality, delivery, and thoughtful customer experience. We ship frequently without sacrificing work/life balance.

To be set up for success in this role, you’ll need to have:

• 5+ years total professional experience as a software engineer
• Django or significant web experience in a similar framework
• The ability to understand complex data processes in a distributed service architecture
• A history of consistently delivering value to customers and internal stakeholders

If any of the below also describe you, this could be an exciting opportunity:

• Worked on a complex, high-traffic site at a startup or software-as-a-service company, ideally with large amounts of data
• Experience with MySQL (or Postgres) and/or ElasticSearch
• Any combination of the following: experience with Celery, Luigi or Airflow, Kafka, AWS, NLP, data model performance tuning, content extraction, application performance tuning
• Familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (like Vue or React) and development patterns
• Interest in journalism, news, media or social media
• Worked in highly collaborative and cross-functional environments. 

In addition, we’re always looking for candidates who:

• Have excellent communication skills, with an ability to explain ideas clearly, give and receive feedback, and work well with team members
• Exhibit a willingness to learn in areas where they have less experience with our tech stack
• Take pride in the quality of their code. (Your code should be  readable, testable, and understandable years later. You adhere to the Zen of Python)
• Work well in a fast-paced development environment with testing, continuous integration and multiple daily deploys
• Have the ability to manage complexity in a large project, and incur technical debt only after considering the tradeoffs
• Take a logical approach to problem solving that combines analytical thinking and intuition

Interview Overview:

Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for this role. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

• 30 min interview with a member of our Talent Team
• A 1 hour zoom interview with the hiring manager
• Take-home assignment (2 hours max)
• Final interview with several team members, including a code discussion

Salary

The starting salary for this role is between $140,000 - $170,000, depending on skills and experience. We take a geo-neutral approach to compensation within the US, meaning that we pay based on job function and level, not location. For all other countries, we have competitive pay bands based on market standards.

Individual compensation decisions are based on a number of factors, including experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. We expect the majority of the candidates who are offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range based on these factors. We recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. If that ends up