Backend Software Engineer (Parse.ly)

Parse.ly is a real-time content measurement layer for the entire web. Our analytics platform helps digital storytellers at some of the web’s best sites, such as Arstechnica, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, Wired, The Intercept, Slate, and many more. In total, our analytics system handles over 65 billion monthly events from over 1 billion monthly unique visitors. 

Our entire stack is in Python and JavaScript, and our team has innovated in areas related to real-time analytics, building some of the best open source tools for working with modern stream processing technologies. 

On the open source front, we maintain streamparse, the most widely used Python binding for the Apache Storm streaming data system. We have also contributed to the development of high-performance Kafka client libraries for Python. 

Our colleagues are dedicated: our UX/design team has built one of the best-looking dashboards on the planet, using Vue.js and D3.js, and our infrastructure engineers have built a scalable, devops-friendly cloud environment, using tools like Ansible and Terraform.

As an experienced Backend Software Engineer, you will help us expand our reach into the area of petabyte-scale data analysis — while ensuring consistent uptime, provable reliability, and top-rated performance of our backend streaming data systems.

Parse.ly’s backend engineering team already makes use of modern technologies like Python 3, Storm, Spark, Kafka, and Elasticsearch to analyze large datasets. As a Backend Software Engineer at Parse.ly, you will be expected to master these technologies, while also being able to write code against them in Python, and debug issues down to the native C code and native JVM code layers, as necessary.

This team is responsible for a real-time analytics infrastructure that processes over 2 million pageviews per minute from over 5,000 high-traffic sites. It operates a fleet of cloud servers that include thousands of cores of live data processing. We have written publicly about mage, our time series analytics engine. This will give you an idea about the kinds of systems we work on.

For this role, you should already be a proficient senior Python programmer who wants to work with data at scale. In this position, you will:

• Write Python code using standard methodologies. See The Elements of Python Style, written by our founding CTO, for an example of our approach to code readability and design.
• Analyze data at an extensive scale. You need to be comfortable with the idea of your code running across 3,000 Python cores, thanks to process-level parallelization.
• Brainstorm new product ideas and directions with the team and customers. You need to be a good communicator, especially in written form.
• Master cloud technologies and systems. You should love UNIX and be able to reason about distributed systems. A favorite book of yours might be Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA).

• Python 3 for both backend and frontend.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) used for production and testing.
• Modern databases like Elasticsearch, Redis, Cassandra, and Postgres.
• Frameworks like Django, Tornado and the PyData stack (e.g. Pandas).
• Kafka, Storm, Spark in production atop large data sets (terabytes per day).
• Easy system management with Fabric, Ansible, and Terraform.

We are a fully distributed team, which means 100% of our engineers, designers, and product managers (including our founders & management team) work out of home offices. This has been true for years, long before the pandemic switched people’s work styles – so we have a thoughtful approach to fully distributed collaboration that has been refined over time.

We prefer to hire within timezone-aligned locations in North and South America for this role. We’ll give preference to those timezones, because even though we operate on a distributed/async model, we like to have timezone overlap for f2f (video) teamwork and pairing.

In February 2021, Parse.ly was acquired by Automattic's enterprise software division, WPVIP. Automattic is one of the biggest champions of open source and the open web, and also one of the top fully distributed employers in the world. Though you will interview for the Parse.ly team within WPVIP and Automattic, if you receive a job offer, it will be to become an Automattician, which means having colleagues who observe the Automattic creed and getting access to Automattic's excellent employee benefits. You can also view Automattic employee benefits by country here.
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