Senior Software Development Engineer, SDK (Open Source)

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

We are seeking a software engineer who is interested in working across a variety of programming languages and environments. You will join our friendly and creative team, having a key role in helping us to deliver easy-to-use APIs that enable application developers to create robust solutions that rely on real-time data delivered by our cloud service.

Developers interact with our service, for the most part, using our client library software. This type of software, more often referred to as a software development kit (SDK), accelerates the development of servers and client apps that interact with our service. All of our SDKs are open source and available on GitHub. We are receptive to contributions from our customers, the developers they work with and the wider open-source community.

Day to day you will

• Provide technical leadership for a selection of our SDKs, working closely with our Product Manager
• Mentor, coach and lead members of the team with regards to best practices, technical knowledge and development lifecycle
• Manage the full lifecycle of SDK, including the development of new features, maintenance, bug fixing and testing
• Formulate API proposals and the published specifications for new features, including liaison with the customers requesting them
• Provide support to our developer community, resolving issues raised against our client library SDKs

We’d love to hear from you if you have

• Experience developing public facing APIs and/or SDKs
• Experience leading cross-functional teams through coaching and mentoring and making technical decisions to drive projects forward
• Demonstrable leadership experience in mobile development teams, shipping applications at scale
• A growth mindset - you view intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and that they can be improved through effort
• A pragmatic approach; the ability to to quickly and successfully embrace change and adapt effectively in response
• A strong focus on customer outcomes and the ability to quickly comprehend and convert business requirements into technical solutions
• A passion to contribute to and optimize software quality and ways of testing
• Experience with multiple programming languages including at least some of Java, Kotlin, Flutter, Objective-C, Swift and JavaScript
• An understanding of networking and protocols, including some depth of knowledge around network transports as well as data / message packing - we use HTTP and WebSockets as well as JSON and MessagePack
• An understanding of asynchronous testing - in particular system / integration testing of software making network calls - plus an eye for opportunities to layer testing so that portions of the codebase can be validated using pure unit tests

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.