R&D Engineer

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 by 2024.

About this role

Ably is an engineering company at its heart. Our audience ranges from software engineers to CIOs and it's our job to make sure the world knows about Ably.

Ably's aims are to create technically products and features, and we have a newly formed R&D function to establish the technical underpinnings for future product development. You will belong to the R&D team working under the direction of Ably's Co-founder and Chief Scientist. You will contribute to all of the aims of the R&D team, which include:

• Build awareness of the technology landscape by evaluating new technologies, approaches, academic and other research results, and software offerings;
• Undertaking applied research and development directly, creating and developing new concepts and approaches as software deliverables;
• Advance Ably's community presence and standing by a combination of research publications, blog posts, conference presentations and open source software offerings, where these are relevant to the R&D plans being undertaken.

We are looking for candidates who have an established interest in distributed systems who can contribute to these aims.

Day to day, you will

• Work as a software developer on new features or other enhancements related to the Ably product, working both on existing codebases and green-field projects.
• Review, and gain a theoretical and practical understanding of technology developments that are potentially applicable, whether those are other research outputs, open source software projects, or product offering.
• Create original contributions, either theoretical or practical, to address specific product challenges.
• Produce research outputs ranging from conference or journal papers, blog or other online content, to open source software.
• Participate in customer and market research to understand our use-cases for Ably's projects, including talking directly to developers within Ably's customer community.
• Analyse Ably's existing code and services, to understand its behaviour, design features and limitations, and its operation in practice.
• Support realisation of the results of R&D as project features, working with the engineering and product teams.

We'd love to here from you if

• An active interest, and experience working on, distributed systems problems. Find out what it takes to be a distributed systems engineer.
• Backed by an academic background in Computing Science or Maths.
• Professional development experience in Go and Nodejs.
• An excellent practical understanding of distributed systems software, networking, protocols and systems programming.

It would be nice, but not essential if

• Experience of building and operating production systems at scale.
• Experience in a research setting involving topics relevant to our product including realtime and distributed systems, protocols, collaboration and associated technologies.

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 extremely 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 recognize 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.