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iSpot competes for the best talent. Our compensation packages consist of salary and equity in one of Seattle’s hottest start-ups, as well as other standard benefits. Most importantly, we provide a really interesting working experience, and the chance to contribute to the success of something great.
What You’ll Be Part Of:
At iSpot.tv, we deal with BIG data, operating in a high-scale AWS environment with thousands of servers processing massive streams of media metadata. As a Senior SDE, you are a foundational pillar of our engineering team. You own entire domains, drive scalable solutions, and act as a "go-to" expert.
We are currently looking for an AI-native engineer – someone who views AI not as a novelty, but as a core component of their development lifecycle – to help lead our mission-critical data evolution and contribute to the vision of Creative Audience and Outcomes Pillar.
Responsibilities:
1. Technical Excellence & Domain Ownership
- Coding & Debugging: You will design domains with testability and multiple teams in mind, creating extensible and shareable codebases. You are expected to provide prescriptive code reviews that suggest more acceptable code patterns and contribute to company-wide style guidelines.
- Quality & Release: You will maintain a high standard of quality, setting the example for the team. This involves developing the architecture for our automation systems and expertly debugging complex issues within the CI/CD pipeline. You will be responsible for implementing secure deployment strategies, especially for large-scale, high-risk projects.
2. AI-Driven Productivity & Innovation
- AI-First Mindset: You are expected to be "AI-native." You will actively explore and learn about AI technologies that enhance the efficiency of the entire team's work.
- Leading Adoption: You create space for teammates to improve their AI tooling through pairing, providing demos, and writing documentation.
- Creative Problem Solving: You are a pioneer in critical technologies, bringing creative solutions to complex, large-scale projects and ensuring your contributions can be extended far into the future.
3. Operational Excellence & Data Strategy
- Data-Driven RCA: You will propose and implement viable domain measurement solutions. You'll play a lead role in researching external solutions and leading root cause analysis (RCA) for complex, multi-domain incidents. You will expertly handle on-call for the team’s services, write and update runbooks, and coach newer team members on investigating alerts and incidents.
- Data Pipeline Ownership: You will design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines – authoring and orchestrating Airflow DAGs, leveraging Snowflake for large-scale analytics workloads – ensuring data flows are observable, performant, and cost-efficient.
- Operational Efficiency & Toil Reduction: You are expected to proactively improve the current state of operations by identifying and reducing toil. You will apply a "Platform Engineering" mindset to automate repetitive manual tasks, ensuring the team remains focused on high-value engineering.
- Scalability & Influence: You will build internal networks to improve organizational speed and the quality of technology solutions, removing obstacles for the team as they arise. You are the "go-to" person for the team, identifying trends and introducing broad solutions to address systemic issues.
- Cost-Conscious Engineering: You will drive a mature cost-optimization strategy, ensuring that architectural decisions and cloud resource utilization are both performant and cost-efficient. You are expected to balance technical excellence with business value, treating cost-consciousness as a core pillar of system reliability.
4. Leadership & Collaboration
- Strategic Alignment: You routinely work cross-functionally to align partners and stakeholders with the project vision and strategy.
- Mentorship: You mentor junior team members, ensuring your communication promotes clarity and inspires action. You onboard and coach other engineers in engineering best practices and AI-first mindset adoption.
- Conflict Resolution: You are adept at handling personal conflicts within the team and navigating ambiguity to reach strategic milestones.
Qualifications and Education Requirements:
- Experience: 5-7 years in developing software for shareable features across multiple engineering projects. Experience leading small-to-mid-sized technical initiatives is required.
- Architectural Leadership: Proven ability to make high-level architectural decisions, including redesigning legacy services to ensure they are highly reliable and operable. You follow industry best practices for high-availability API design and the streamlining of complex database operations.
- Platform Engineering: Hands-on experience with Platform Engineering principles, focusing on internal developer experience, infrastructure abstraction, and building self-service capabilities for engineering teams.
- Cloud Native: Expert knowledge of AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, IAM).
- Infrastructure as Code: Hands-on experience with Terraform.
- Tech Required: Java, Snowflake, Apache Airflow (DAG design and development), MySQL, Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, RabbitMQ (or similar message broker), Spring Boot, CI/CD pipelines.
- AI Native: Experience using AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development (e.g., Kiro, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor, or similar, Claude Code).
- Soft Skills: Strong communication skills with the ability to tailor messaging to different audiences, from junior devs to senior leadership. Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
Preferred Skills:
- Experience with CI/CD concepts (CircleCI).
- A track record of identifying trends in incidents and introducing broad solutions to address them.
Target cash compensation range: $140,183 - $179,436 USD Annually
We are committed to providing competitive, market-informed compensation. The cash compensation above includes base salary, variable commission for employees in eligible roles, and annual bonus targets for eligible roles. In addition to cash compensation, all full time iSpotters are eligible to participate in iSpot’s equity plan to receive stock options. Non-exempt roles will also be eligible for (pre-approved) overtime pay. Individual compensation packages are influenced by different factors unique to each candidate, including their skills, experience, qualifications and other job-related reasons.
For more information on total rewards package, go HER
If you don't feel you met every single requirement for the role, don't rule yourself out. Please apply anyway!
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