Staff Software Engineer (Reliability)

At Workiva, we prioritize a customer-first philosophy in everything we do. As a Staff Software Engineer on our Site Reliability team, you'll be designing and coding innovative solutions that elevate our solutions' reliability and performance. While this role is part of the SRE team, we're seeking a traditional Software Engineer with strong coding and design skills to complement our existing reliability expertise. You'll have the opportunity to lead, define what excellence looks like, and deliver impactful solutions across our organization.

The goal of the SRE team is to ensure Workiva customers have a seamless experience. Unlike traditional SRE models, we don’t rely on ticketing systems. Instead, we empower developer teams with tools, processes and best practices enabling them to self-serve and take ownership of their own operations. Our solutions make the right choice the easiest choice.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer with a passion for running services in production and building internal solutions.  Workiva is creating new complex  data processing workflows , this is a new challenge for us, where we move well beyond simple SLOs and an opportunity to design and own new solutions from the ground up, drive their implementation, and lead the team through execution. Additionally, you’ll play a key role in communicating and training stakeholders across the organization to ensure successful adoption of best practices.

What You'll Do

Leadership and Influence

• Become the technical owner of tools used by our whole engineering organization

• Lead team members in exploring new approaches that will provide innovative solutions 

• Collaborate with architects to set best practices across the organization

• Foster continuous improvement in technology, methodology, and relationships across R&D focused on increasing reliability, scalability and observability of software

• Lead design and implementation for innovative problems in the area of data quality and AI

Communication and Collaboration

• Align with staff engineers across Workiva, working together on common problems

• Clearly communicate concise technical visions and directions

• Estimate effort levels, break down complex problems, manage dependencies, create plans for complex projects

• Provide guidance and solutions to development teams to achieve company goals

Technical Skills

• Apply architectural patterns and solutions to enhance the reliability and scalability of systems

• Use Infrastructure-as-Code solutions to automate and streamline infrastructure processes

• Utilize Opentelemetry and Kubernetes to build and maintain observability and orchestration capabilities for complex environments

• Participate in on-call rotations which include 24x7 support of complex environments

• Develop and maintain code in one or more core languages (Python, Golang, Java) to support system functionality and improvements

• Collaborate on UI-related initiatives as needed, contributing to the development of user-facing technologies

• Design complete innovative applications or solutions to meet customer needs and requirements

• Design systems to enable rapid development, high availability, and clear observability

What You'll Need

Required Qualifications

• Undergraduate Degree or equivalent combination of education and experience in a related field

• 4+ years of experience in site reliability, software engineering, or other relevant experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with systems performance tuning and load testing 

• Experience with Go, Python or Java

• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other cloud environments

• Experience with common technologies like Git, Nginx, Docker, MySQL and PostgreSQL 

• Experience with GitHub or other distributed VCS

• Experience writing code that works across platforms and browsers

• Knowledge of recent UI developments (Typescript, Dart, React, microfrontends, etc)

• Experience with Apache Kafka , ideally experience with Redshift, Snowflake or