Staff Software Engineer, Core Libraries - Slack

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Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

We’re Salesforce, the Customer Company, inspiring the future of business with AI+ Data +CRM. Leading with our core values, we help companies across every industry blaze new trails and connect with customers in a whole new way. And, we empower you to be a Trailblazer, too — driving your performance and career growth, charting new paths, and improving the state of the world. If you believe in business as the greatest platform for change and in companies doing well and doing good – you’ve come to the right place.

Background

Slack enables people all over the world to communicate and collaborate together. Teams of all scales — from the world’s largest public companies to the smallest of startups — use Slack to get work done, so we take performance and reliability very seriously. A taste of our scale:

• The average user spends over 10 hours connected and 2.5 hours active in Slack every single day
• 1.5 billion+ messages are sent per month, half of those outside the United States
• Every day we see over 10M+ daily active users, over a billion web requests, and 10s of billions of database queries.
• We handle about 600k requests per second, summing up the entire day gets us at about 6 billion API requests served per day.
• For millions of people, Slack is the primary communication tool they use at work all day long. They expect it to be extraordinarily reliable and fast, all the time.

About the Team

Webapp Infra (WIN) pillar provides the tools to make it possible for hundreds of developers to develop in a multi million line codebase with safety and productivity at the forefront. WIN handles maintenance and upgrades of the Hack programming language, static analysis tooling, widely used libraries in the codebase, asynchronous job queue, as well as tuning and debugging the HHVM runtime and other services it depends on. With four sub-teams : Core Libraries, Runtime, Reliability aka WIRE and Asynchronous Services (AServ), the Webapp infra team supports the middle layers of the stack above the AWS instances and below the product code.

This role is open for the Core Libraries sub-team.

WebApp Core Libraries maintains and develop our WebApp API, language tooling and enable co-development of infrastructure and product features. Our customers are both Core Infrastructure service owners, and backend developers. Core Librarians have deep knowledge of Webapp internals, infrastructure sensibilities and a product perspective. We build relationships and resilient feedback loops at the intersection of the WebApp API.

We rapidly iterate and work closely with other teams in engineering to ensure we build resilient systems that can scale. We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability should be primary aspects of the systems that we build. We are ambitious, empathetic, independent, and pragmatic.

What you will be doing:

• Collaborate with peers across Engineering to triage bugs and fix complex production issues across the stack, especially with respect to performance, memory, and stability
• Write, review, or provide feedback on a technical design proposal
• Maintain client libraries that allow backend engineers to access all the capabilities of our Webapp platform
• Work with the Webapp Hack Language static analysis tooling (Hakana), health score tooling, legacy code migration, and metadata insights (Census) and error tooling infra (Sieve).
• Get feedback on and own the direction and growth of the Webapp standard libraries, and Core Service client; comprising encryption, storage, caching and other features.
• Webapp customer engagement, including NPS survey and interviews, best-practices, and dev advocacy to understand at the core the challenges facing product developers at Slack. Our work enables the future of Slack’s product at the nexus of Core Infra and Product eng.

What you should have:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.
• Possess strong Computer Science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, programming languages, operating system, distributed systems.
• Strong systems thinking abilities. You can reason about queues, retries, concurrency and contention and use them to build useful models of real software.
• Experience with Linux, including common debuggin