Staff Engineer-Full Stack-HCP Terraform Foundations Agent Services Engineering

IBM; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A global technology firm is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the Agent Services Engineering team. This role requires strong backend development skills, expertise in distributed systems, and the ability to guide and mentor team members. The successful candidate will develop core services using Golang, collaborate on architecture with stakeholders, and establish best practices for service security and performance. This position offers opportunities for professional growth within a rapidly expanding user base.

Qualifications

• 7+ years as a backend software engineer with front end experience.
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems.
• Familiarity with application and infrastructure security best practices.
• Proficiency in Go; Rails monolith experience

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain core services written in Golang.
• Work with stakeholders to define architecture and Front End.
• Establish best practices around service security and performance.
• Investigate problems and bottlenecks spanning multiple services
• Strive for quality through maintainable code and comprehensive testing
• Communicate clearly with empathy and kindness
• Learn through humility and reflection
• Debug performance bottlenecks for live services and systems
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation for production services

Skills

Backend software engineering

Front end experience with Ember or React

Distributed systems

Service security best practices

Strong communication skills

Leadership and mentoring

Code reviews

Performance debugging

Tools

Golang

JavaScript

Ember.js

React

Rails

Job description

Overview

The Foundations team is composed of Site Reliability Engineers and Software Engineers working on the HCP Terraform hosted service. Our team ensures that the platform’s underlying infrastructure, data stores, and core foundational services are reliable, performant, and scalable.

The Foundations team is composed of Site Reliability Engineers and Software Engineers working on the HCP Terraform hosted service. Our team ensures that the platform’s underlying infrastructure, data stores, and core foundational services are reliable, performant, and scalable.

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to join our team and serve as the Technical Leader of the Agent Services Engineering team. The Engineers on our team own the core foundational services that power the entire HCP Terraform Agent. These mission-critical services and data stores compose the Terraform plan and apply pipeline, and are used by every Terraform run which hits HCP Terraform.

An ideal candidate will have experience building distributed systems at scale, a principled approach to service security, and an interest in working closely with both infrastructure and feature teams to solve complex problems that span several services.

If you fit this profile, we’d love to meet you! We have a large footprint and a quickly-growing user base, with lots of interesting problems and plenty of opportunities for growth and development.

Your Role And Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain the Agent core services written in Golang as well as the Front End code that’s in Ember.js
• Work with product and stakeholders to define the next-generation architecture and Front End of the HCP Terraform Agent
• Establish and foster best practices around service security and performance
• Investigate problems, performance bottlenecks, and orchestration issues which span multiple services
• Strive for quality through maintainable code and comprehensive testing from development to deployment
• Communicate clearly while remaining empathetic and kind
• Have an eagerness to learn through humility and reflection
• Have experience debugging performance bottlenecks for live services and systems
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation that supports our production services

As The Tech Lead, You Can Expect To

• Provide technical leadership to teammates through coaching and mentorship
• Be responsible for technical deliverables, development timelines, and ensuring software architecture is aligned with the business and customer needs
• Planning project scope and direction aligning with business and customer needs
• Conduct code reviews and monitoring compliance with coding standards

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

You probably have:

• 7+ years as a backend software engineer and front end experience using Ember, JavaScript, or React
• Experience building and scaling distributed, highly-available systems
• Informed opinions from experience about service ownership best practices, incident response and resolution, and platform resiliency
• Solid knowledge with one systems language, and ability to code in several more (our foundational services are written in Go and we also have a Rails monolith)
• Experience debugging performance bottlenecks for live services and systems
• Familiarity with best practices for application and infrastructure security
• Strong communication and leadership skills