The Infrastructure Engineering Team at BlockFi plays a crucial role in designing and communicating company-wide strategy while establishing guidelines across the engineering organization. Our members work collaboratively with stakeholders and developers to influence the design of systems running in production and act as integral & embedded members of the engineering teams they interact with.
Your Mission
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you’ll work closely with engineering and architecture teams to continuously improve the design of our cloud infrastructure platforms and communicate company-wide infrastructure architectural strategy. We are looking for proactive, collaborative, and hands-on engineers with experience building from the ground up that have real world distributed systems experience at scale
- Architect/Design:
- Develop strategies, write proposals for new architectures, systems, and processes, and communicate them to diverse stakeholders in terms they can understand.
- Work with diverse stakeholders to ensure our systems are built for quality attributes like availability, reliability, resilience, scalability, performance, and security from the ground up.
- Mentor teams on design proposals, tradeoff analyses, and design review practices. Ensure significant design decisions are publicly documented with tradeoffs clearly described.
- Facilitate cross-team and cross-functional communication to specify the problem domain, business goals, quality attribute requirements, and timelines for committing to architectural decisions.
- Deliver and Own Solutions:
- Enable early and continuous delivery of business value, integrating across technical (development, architecture, security, product, operations, etc.) and non-technical functions.
- Identify problems before they happen across systems/domains.
- Build prototypes, models, and scaffolding for new technologies.
- Ensure that teams adhere to quality standards through cross-team communication, mentoring, code review, and backlog grooming.
- Lead:
- Act as a multiplier by developing patterns, systems, standards, and tools that increase productivity across engineering.
- Lead conversations about technical direction across large portions of our technology. Listen and guide debates to help reach consensus across teams; once a decision is made, clearly communicate and support that decision.
- Build relationships across domains and business functions.
- Think one or two years in the future, and develop prototypes to explore solutions to longer-term problems.
- Guide tech leads and team members in carefully considering business goals, trade-offs, quality attributes, cross-cutting concerns, and risks prior to committing to design decisions.
- Continuously improve engineering standards, processes, planning, solutions, and efficiency.
- Adapt:
- Quickly learn new tools and technologies, develop an understanding of existing systems, and identify and tackle high impact work.
- Avoid dogmatic positions on technical questions.
- Proactively seek to learn about the company, products, processes, and culture. And align technical decisions with business goals.
Your Expertise
- Technical Breadth as well as Depth in Several Areas: 8+ years of industry experience working with, designing, and building distributed systems at scale, with 5+ years in cloud infrastructure. Able to clearly identify, communicate, and document technical tradeoffs, and guides others to do the same. Understands that there is no single best technical solution, and is able to recognize these tradeoffs across our systems in light of business strategy. Deep expertise across the technology stack from network to database to application.
- Technical Ownership: Experience owning software systems end-to-end, designing, estimating, implementing, testing, maintaining, debugging, and supporting high-quality software in production. Experience with our Cloud / Observability technologies:
- AWS, especially VPC Networking, RDS, IAM Policies, EKS, ECS
- Cloudflare
- Grafana, Prometheus, Loki
- Infrastructure as Code
- Python & Go are our primary languages
- Communication: Excellent communication, presentation and interpersonal skills. Able to listen and learn from as well as explain complex ideas to stakeholders of varying levels of technical expertise.
- Collaboration: Demonstrable experience with establishing strong relationships with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, integrating a variety of perspectives (end users, product, engineering, etc.). Empathetic and does the legwork required for building consensus. Always seeks out feedback on technical designs and solutions.
- Initiative and focus on outcomes: Prepared to take on high impact work across contexts and as the need arises, working independently and taking initiative while maintaining transparency and collaboration. Proactively identifies problems and comes to conversations with possible solutions.
- Pragmatic: Ability and motivation to quickly learn new technologies and systems. Pragmatic bias toward outcomes, and technical decisions that solve real business problems. Not afraid to question assumptions and tackle challenges under conditions of uncertainty.
