Flexa
Ably • London, United Kingdom

Distributed Systems Engineer (Remote)

Employment type:  Full time
Salary:  Competitive Salary + Monthly Wellbeing Budget

Remote-first

Core hours 11–3

Dog friendly

Job Description

In this role:

You'll be working with a deeply technical engineering team who collectively bring a wealth of experience and broad technology skills. The calibre of the code we produce is what excites us each day and motivates us. If you enjoy solving hard distributed system problems that are mostly platform agnostic and theoretical in nature, then you'll love working at Ably.

Day to day you can expect to:

  • Work on the core realtime platform which is largely Node.js and Go. We are looking for developers who have a strong track record in at least one of these technologies.
  • Solve distributed systems problems. Find out what it takes to be a distributed systems engineer.
  • Own and be responsible for the complete lifecycle of your features and code, all the way through to deployment.
  • Contribute to open source projects that we support or use in our products, including our open source client libraries.

Skills & Experience:

General: We are looking for candidates that can demonstrate an interest in technically challenging topics in computing, especially relating to realtime and distributed systems, networking and systems programming. Successful candidates will be able to demonstrate their ability to contribute and solve problems in these areas via professional experience and/or personal projects. Ultimately, ability will outweigh specific experience when reviewing candidates for this position.

Experience: We don't have any specific experience requirements that are essential for the role. We will strongly prefer candidates that do have a track record with Node.js and ideally Go, or can show experience in solving problems in distributed systems, and ideally have some familiarity with systems-level programming as well experience with high-level languages.

Open source: We prefer developers who have contributed back to the open source community, even if those contributions are small.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

Founded by two engineers who spotted a hard and largely unsolved problem, Ably is, at its heart, an engineering company. To provide the infrastructure required for a high-bandwidth, always-connected world, we hire engineers with a broad set of technical skills who are ready and capable of taking on challenging realtime engineering problems.

As a company and engineering team we’re committed to a future internet that’s open, with all engineers contributing to existing open source projects.

We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well. As an Ablyan, you’ll enjoy taking ownership and making an impact, with work that is both varied and challenging. To thrive at Ably, you’ll need to believe in and be prepared to do your work in line with our values, which are:

  • Open for all. Open is a mindset. When open, we’re better collaborators, communicators and creators. Whether open source, standards, or protocols, open hearts, minds, and eyes. It’s better when it’s open.
  • Bias for action. We avoid analysis paralysis at all costs. We lean into doing in order to move us forward. When we have enough of what we need to act, we act.
  • Even the best do better. We want to be the best - but that doesn’t mean we rest when we are. Improvement and growth - true betterment - is an ongoing journey. One fuelled by curiosity and taking risks.
  • Technology needs humanity. Our technology means little without people - whether that’s how we treat our colleagues, or how we design developer experiences. Being human matters.
  • Dependable people make dependable things. Dependability is integral to our mission and technology, but being dependable starts with our people. When we care enough to take real ownership of our products and problems - all else will follow.
  • Bold creativity leads to the greatest rewards. When viewed through a different lens, what stands in the way can become the way. The bigger the challenge the easier the choice: bold creativity will always move us forward, create better outcomes, and set us apart.

What’s in it for you?

  • A great company culture
  • Share options
  • The chance to learn and grow with a fast-moving company, supported by a learning budget of £1,000 that gives you access to professional training, events, conferences, workshops etc.
  • Remote first: Unless you want to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London, you’ll work from home most of the time, apart from when we have planning sessions and Summits. Travel to the office is at the employee's expense, apart from when we have Ably Summits
  • Your choice of high quality tech kit to work on
  • Home workstation set up budget of £500, plus an annual top-up of £150
  • Regular company away days and social events
  • Friday need-to-know drinks and snacks
  • Private health insurance, including Doctor@Hand
  • Access to private and confidential coaching via Sanctus
  • 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme with AXA
  • A monthly wellbeing budget with Juno
  • Enhanced parental leave
  • 25 days of paid annual leave (33 days including bank holidays)
  • 10 days of paid sick leave (including mental health days) per year
  • Dog friendly office for when you’re in the office!

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the spec exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.

Company benefits

Open to part-time employees
Sabbaticals
Enhanced maternity leave – a gender-neutral parental leave with equal leave for primary and secondary caregivers; a generous and competitive amount of leave; compassion for anyone facing loss, whether through miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, or unfilled adoption. For more details visit https://ably.com/blog/ably-inclusive-parental-leave-policy
Enhanced paternity leave
Adoption leave
Shared parental leave
28 days annual leave + bank holidays
Work from home allowance
Juno wellbeing benefits
Pregnancy loss leave
Teambuilding days
Hofy home office set up
Share options
Health insurance, including Doctor@Hand
Employee Assistance Programme
Ongoing professional development (training, events, conferences)
Regular company away days and social events

The FlexScore® is the result of a rigorous 2-step verification of a company’s flexibility

First we assess the flexibility options Ably provides and then we anonymously survey a statistically significant proportion of their employees to make sure Ably is as flexible as they say they are. Our assessment is based on the six key elements of flexibility: location, hours, autonomy, benefits, role modelling and work-life balance.

We ask the hard questions so you don’t have to.

Working at Ably

Company employees

134

Gender diversity (male:female)

16:24:3 (Female:Male:Other)

Office locations

London, UK & Boston, Massachusetts

Funding levels

$70m

Hiring Countries

United Kingdom
United States

Awards & Achievements

Saas & Dev Software

Saas & Dev Software

Industry awards 2022