Staff Software Engineer

With our growing customer base and our expansion into new markets and use cases, we have more to build than ever at Affinity as we execute on our vision to put relationship intelligence at every professional’s fingertips.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll have the opportunity to evolve the implementation of the spreadsheet-like interfaces that are core to how our users manage and view their data in the application. This is a particularly complex domain because the data modeling needs to be extremely flexible to support unique use cases. You’ll also guide the future of the new automations offering, which enables configuring workflows to manipulate data using if-this-then-that rules.

Additionally, this team owns:

• Relationship Intelligence, including the calculation and surfacing of relationship strengths between people based on ingested datasets
• The embedded Analytics platform that provides customizable data visualizations
• Search, notifications, and reminders functionality

In this role, you will:

• Become the deep expert in the above product areas, lead the technical design of critical initiatives, and be an active code contributor during execution phases
• Ensure our software is architecturally consistent and delivers a snappy user experience
• Collaborate across team boundaries to align on and coordinate change, as this team manages data models that have touchpoints upstream and downstream
• Research and propose new technologies or architectures that drive the team’s critical systems while considering the larger implications
• Mentor other engineers to uplevel them individually and the team as a whole
• Promote operational excellence with focus on high reliability, performance, and scalability
• Work at all levels of the stack, with a preference for backend development

Qualifications:

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

• You have ~10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3+ years of experience leading teams that deliver end-to-end systems
• You’re comfortable troubleshooting across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage, and distributed services layers
• You’re an expert in one or more OOP languages and modern OOD, with some experience using Ruby
• You know how to diagnose and improve performance issues systematically
• You can effectively contribute to technical strategy and roadmaps on product-oriented teams
• You communicate nuanced ideas clearly, whether you’re explaining technical decisions in writing or brainstorming in real time
• You demonstrate strong ownership instincts and sweat the details
• You have strong convictions, weakly held, and assume validation and iteration are a given to produce the best results
• You’re excited to work on a cross-functional team, partnering with product stakeholders, other teams, and subject matter experts

Nice to have:

• A combination of startup and brand-name SaaS companies experience
• Experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka
• Experience with React and Typescript

Tech stack:

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. We’re leaning into event-driven architecture using Kafka. Our infrastructure is hosted by AWS and runs on Kubernetes.

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver incremental value to our customers each sprint.
• We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with. 
• We make data-driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available.

Join us in enabling every professional on the planet to succeed by harnessing the power of their relationships.

If you’d want to learn more about our values click here.

What you’ll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values as playmakers, obsessed with learning, caring personally about our colleagues and clients, are radically open-minded, and take pride in everything we do.
• We pay your medical, dental, and vision insurance with comprehensive PPO and HMO plans. And provide flexible personal & sick days. We want our team to be happy and healthy :) 
• We offer a 401k plan to help you plan for retirement.
• We provide an annual budget for you to spend on education and offer a comprehensive L&D program – after all, one of our core values is that we’re #obsessedwithlearning! 
• We support our employee’s overall health and well-being and reimburse monthly for things such as; transportation, Home Internet, Meals, and Wellness memberships/equipment.
• Virtual team building and socials. Keeping people connected is essential.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job.  

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $160,000 - $230,000 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.