Flexa
Ably • London, UK (Remote)

Staff Engineer, Missions

Remote-first

Core hours 11–3

Dog friendly

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 working with colleagues in an online collaborative environment - consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. At Ably we’re not just witnessing this revolution - we’re powering it.

At the heart of our mission lies a commitment to putting developers first. Ably provides a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime, delivering billions of messages for millions of devices every day and supporting organizations like Split, Hubspot, Toyota and Genius Sports.

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. And we’d like your help.

About this role

Product innovation at Ably is delivered by highly autonomous, fast moving, cross-functional mission teams; like startups within a startup. As a Staff Engineer you'll act as Technical Lead and spearhead one of those missions, working extremely closely with a core team composed of a Product Manager and a team of mission engineers, with additional support from product marketing, developer education, interaction design, and platform technology teams.

You will leverage your technical expertise to solve difficult technical problems, solving those problems by delivering APIs and software to our developer customers, with a hands-on approach. But you will also be a leader who thinks about the business impact of the work. You’ll help make the team great - in both strategy and execution - by challenging and developing strong engineers on the team, and by creating a positive culture that celebrates delivering great software.

Day to day you will

  • Drive architectural decisions to successful conclusions. You’ll play a lead role in making strategic architectural decisions that have a significant impact on Ably's products and systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
  • Build innovative solutions. You’ll work together with a talented group of skilled engineers to ideate and build innovative solutions to complex problems, such as:
    • Building a fault-tolerant, high-throughput database streaming application for event-driven architectures,
    • Designing and implementing intuitive APIs and tooling for building delightful multi-user collaborative experiences.
    • Developing powerful features like chat-room moderation that enable developers to build live chat applications at planet scale.
  • Learn from fast-moving experiments to shape new features. You’ll foster a culture of experimentation and continuous learning within the team, leveraging insights to inform the evolution of the product.
  • Design developer-friendly APIs and SDKs. You’ll help build products that are intuitive, easy to use and delight developers, helping them experience success with the Ably’s features easily.
  • Be driven by “Developer First” principles. You’ll collaborate closely with the mission Product Manager and other stakeholders to develop a deep understanding of the needs of developers and how to solve their most important problems.
  • Mentor, coach and lead. You’ll help develop team members, nurturing their growth and help advance their skills.
  • Engage with the developer community. You’ll actively engage with the developer community, both directly and indirectly, to gather feedback, establish relationships, and promote Ably’s solutions.

We'd love to hear from you if you have

  • Experience leading cross-functional teams through coaching and mentoring and making technical decisions to drive projects forward
  • Systems design expertise, with an understanding of high level architectural considerations around performance, scalability and reliability.
  • Experience with multiple programming languages including solid skills with JavaScript/TypeScript and at least one statically-typed compiled language like Golang.
  • Experience working with a range of technologies across the stack, including (but not limited to) AWS, databases, networks, caches, web technologies.
  • A strong intuition for high-quality API design and appreciation for great developer experiences.
  • A product mindset, with a strong focus on customer outcomes and the ability to quickly comprehend and convert business requirements into technical solutions
  • 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.
  • Passion for the art of software development and modern trends that shape how developers work.
  • Excited at the prospect of being entrepreneurial and driving innovation in new product areas for a developer-first product.

It would be great, but not essential if you have

  • Experience building developer-first products.
  • Experience working on multiplayer, collaborative applications.
  • Experience of distributed systems and concurrent programming.
  • Experience with products that are brought to market primarily through a product led growth approach.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

We’re tackling planet-scale problems and our ambitions are a testament to that. You’ll join a successful, deeply motivated and collaborative team that thrives on innovation, experimentation and autonomy.

To get a sense of life at Ably, visit our careers page at ably.com/careers. You can also read about the origins of Ably's core values on our blog (ably.com/blog/ably-values).

Our aspiration is to foster a company culture that's built on inclusivity and mutual respect among all team members. 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.

Ably is a remote-first company and, amongst other things, we offer a generous holiday allowance, private healthcare and substantial opportunities for learning and development, and access to a wealth of resources dedicated to your wellbeing. We’re proud to go the extra mile to support the welfare and prospects of Ablyans and their long-term goals.

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.

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