Lead Backend Engineer
SeaWorld is building top-notch, in-park digital experiences, and we need your help. We’re looking for a motivated and fast-moving individual contributor who can own systems, write tests, and collaborate across team boundaries to Do The Right Work.
The Role
This is an awesome opportunity to flex your people and technical skills at the same time. The API that you will own securely and performantly exposes SeaWorld’s back-of-house systems to our mobile clients on iOS, Android and Web, to support our 2021 digital experience and ecommerce goals. You will report to the Director of Mobile Engineering, and have wide remit to build scalable, secure and performant systems.
Concretely, you will be responsible for coding up (and writing tests for!) new API endpoints in our public API, and doing deep dives through SeaWorld’s systems to support new API surface area to support our mobile experiences. If you’re interested in stretching your DevOps legs, there’s plenty of room for that as well.
While you will own the mobile API, we will also be relying on you to provide your expertise cross-functionally. We work with different teams and codebases within SeaWorld, and you will have the opportunity to contribute to quality engineering practices company-wide.
Technology
- The API you will own is written in F#. Powerful type inference atop the CLR, with top-notch IDE support is a clear winner.
- We deploy into AWS (and pay for premium support to unblock and accelerate your DevOps goals).
- We expect to be selecting high performance K/V stores and time-series databases in the very near future, and look forward to your input on those choices and their engineering requirements.
- Development experience on Windows is a plus, but not a requirement. Leaning on the WSL may get the job done just fine!
You
Obviously this describes our ideal candidate, but nobody’s perfect :) Even if you’re not a 10/10 hits-all-ideal-attributes, we’d like to get to know you for this role and others in the pipeline.
You’re enthusiastic about software, above and beyond the tools you use in your day job. Perhaps you’ve never shipped production Haskell, but maybe you have opinions about LISP-1 versus LISP-2 environments, or shoehorned Lua somewhere nobody expected it. You’re a CI/CD advocate, write tests, and understand at least one cloud provider pretty well.
You advocate for and implement automation supporting continuous deployment and other engineering productivity techniques.
You have 5-7+ years of experience shipping code to production systems at scale. Come prepared to share stories about outages :) Your experience in deploying to cloud environments will be extremely educational to the SeaWorld software engineering teams at large.
We value curiosity, intellectual horsepower, and a commitment to shipping software and tending production systems.
Soft Skills
You write concise, accurate emails, that are appropriately technical for the expected audience. You write design documents that clearly articulate the engineering problem, and how your solutions address it.
You level up your peers through code review. You interview with compassion and an eye to mitigating your own biases.
You will be integrating with SeaWorld’s existing galaxy of systems, so a willingness to roll up your sleeves and get the software archaeology trowel out will be crucial to your success.
Technical Skills
Please don’t self-disqualify based on these keywords! They’re just a guide :))
- AWS
- .NET
- API development (RESTful or RPC)
- 5-7 (or more!) years writing and deploying code to production systems
- Functional experience a plus
- .NET (Core) experience a plus
- Experience and confidence in writing integration and unit tests
- 3+ years contributing to deployment and infrastructure tooling
- AWS experience a plus
- Production monitoring experience a plus
Our Team
You will report into the Director of Mobile Engineering, in the Product Research and Development organization. We are a new team at SeaWorld that owns all digital guest interactions, from website funnel optimizations through to our new mobile applications.
You will be working with a data-driven team of ecommerce, user experience, and software development veterans from eBay, Walmart, and Google who have coalesced around a mission to build the best digital experience in the industry.
We look forward to your support in establishing metrics for everything that we do, from release cycle time to MTTR on incidents :)
The Hiring Process
- Send in a resume, and ideally a cover letter.
This tells us about your work history, and gives you the opportunity to tell us why you’re interested in the position.
- Video chat screen
We’ll spend half of our time spot-checking the claims that you make in your resume and cover letter, and half the time pitching you on the opportunity; no trivia quizzes, we seek to confirm that you can speak meaningfully about your experience, and that you’re interested in the position. Half of this call is for you to ask any questions you might have about the team, project, technology, and career advancement, and pitch us on your candidacy.
- Soft skills and leadership
We’ll chat about your experience with various SLDC models, your experience working in teams, and writing code as a social endeavor.
- Technical dive
15 minutes of deeper conversations about some of the topics from your phone screen we found interesting, 15 minutes for you to ask us questions, and 30 minutes for a toy programming problem in the programming language and IDE of your choice, with full access to search engines or any other resources you want. This is not an algorithms and data structures interview, but a modeling problem that gives you the opportunity to demonstrate that you understand your chosen language and IDE.