Senior Software Engineer, Realtime

Job Description

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Whether attending an event in a virtual venue, receiving realtime financial information, or monitoring live car performance data – consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. Ably provides a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime for more than 265 million devices across 80 countries each month, supporting organizations like Toyota, Bloomberg and Hubspot.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of the internet. The opportunity in front of us is immense. But we can’t rest yet. And we’d like your help. As Ably enters its next stage of growth, we’re looking for talented and curious individuals to help us build and deliver the platform to power synchronized digital experiences in realtime for one billion devices every week.

In this role

The Realtime team owns the core backend that underpins Ably’s entire edge messaging platform. This is a unique opportunity to help us develop and improve this platform, solving hard distributed systems problems and working on planet-scale infrastructure.

You’ll be hands-on, working on the development of new functionality and initiatives to scale Ably’s core Realtime platform and improve performance.

You can read more about the core concepts of working on a truly distributed system in our blog post here.

Day to day, you will

• Optimise Ably’s core platform infrastructure. You’ll help design, develop, deploy and optimise backend services with a focus on low latency, high availability and scalability.
• Contribute to the delivery of key functionality. You’ll work on projects that help scale and evolve our platform, delivering new features, improving performance and handling bug fixes and maintenance.
• Solve hard distributed systems problems. You’ll collaborate with a talented team of engineers to solve interesting and challenging problems.
• Be driven by “Developer First” principles. You’ll collaborate closely with other engineers to explore and discover effective solutions that address most important problems developers face.
• Celebrate delivering real customer value. You’ll push hard to see your work get into customers’ hands without delay because you are hungry to see the impact it will have on their projects.

We'd love to hear from you if you have

• A keen interest in, or experience with, distributed systems, performance analysis and/or large scale systems.
• Experience working with or building messaging queues and/or pub/sub systems at scale.
• Extensive experience programming using a high-level server-side language (preferably Node.js or Go).
• You have the ability to self-start and you embrace a growth mindset.
• A pragmatic approach; the ability to quickly and successfully embrace change and adapt effectively in response.
• Experience in dynamic, early stage startups where adaptability and resourcefulness are crucial.
• A transparent and collaborative “build in the open” mindset.

It would be great, but not essential if you have

• Experience building developer-first products.
• Experience with products that are brought to market primarily through a product led growth approach.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

Ably is entering a new phase of growth led by an experienced senior team. You’ll be part of a successful, highly motivated, and collaborative team. We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well.

To see what life’s like at Ably, check out our careers page at ably.com/careers and read the story of how Ably's core values came to be (ably.com/blog/ably-values).

Ably is a remote-first company and we strongly believe in life before work and encourage our people to find a balance between the two.

We recognise that each person is different and will want to be supported in different ways which is why our benefits (ably.com/ukbenefits) are there to help you focus on your needs today and prepare you for your future.

Amongst other things, we offer a generous holiday allowance, private healthcare and significant learning and development opportunities, and provide access to numerous wellbeing resources. We’re proud to do whatever it takes to care for Ablyans and their future.

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Ably

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.

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 job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.