Core Platform Solutions Engineer

Position Summary:  

As a Core Platform Solutions Engineer at Beacon, you will work closely with internal and external stakeholders combining your industry expertise with knowledge of our platform to plan and deploy our Core Platform solutions for our clients. You will be integrated in our clients’ journey beginning from the early stages, serving as a specialist versed in delivering performant tools and cloud-based environments and advice to a variety of different client types inside (and sometimes outside) of financial markets.  Recognising that our clients are themselves software developers who use Beacon as a development platform, this will involve understanding the capabilities and configurations of the Beacon Core Platform components yourself, as well as participating in the scoping and planning of clients’ solutions, and advising clients onwards through their implementation and post-production phases to enable them to leverage Beacon best practices.  In addition to involvement with individual clients, this role requires ability to generalize and advocate proven solutions and combinations that can be replicated across wide client use-cases and types.

Key Responsibilities:

• Become a Beacon Core Platform subject matter expert, understanding the Beacon platform and all of the functionality of the Beacon Core components.  This includes Beacon’s developer tools products (IDE, Software Development Lifecycle, test frameworks), Core APIs, job and task schedulers, database integration, elastic compute, permissions/entitlements, user management/authentication, performance monitoring/logging/metrics.
• Understand how these components can and should be used from a software development perspective (how to interact with them, how their software interfaces work)
• Participate in a variety of client-facing activities (knowledge transfer, advisory/training, troubleshooting, best practices, demonstrations) to help enable clients to get the best out of the Beacon Core platform, including cross-training other internal teams (Sales, Partnerships, etc)
• Understand capabilities, configuration, tuning, etc of the third-party/open source components that are used by Beacon and Beacon’s clients, such as MongoDB, git, Visual Studio Code, Redis, PostgreSQL
• Develop an understanding of the performance and maintenance implications of different configurations of Beacon components.  Be able to understand and convey the pros+cons as a basis for solution design.
• Understand clients’ business needs along the same dimensions, which includes participation in client discovery/requirements/implementation phases, and making recommendations
• Develop and scale up ‘knowledgebase’ and ‘Beacon Recommendation’ materials for use by other client-facing engineering/training teams, as well as clients themselves.  Achieve this through participation with other subject matter experts internally, as well as experimentally.
• Gather and communicate feedback to the Core Product development team, to help qualify and champion product enhancements, as well as contributions (enhancement ideas, proposed patches, documentation gaps / better examples, etc)
• Advancing the procedures for best executing and supporting our clients with more complex/custom requirements, supporting our other client-facing/BA teams.

Required Skills & Approach:     

• Software engineering background. Python 3 and MongoDB expertise required.
• Excellent client-facing attitude and communication skills
• Ability to interface with internal and external teams (stakeholders, SMEs, managers, other developers)  at different technical levels, operating in a dynamic mixed disciplinary environment
• Willingness to research, experiment, analyse, document findings, draw conclusions
• Experience with team-based software development processes and practices, version control (ideally git), software development lifecycle.  Familiarity with many of the needs of organisations more broadly (change control and deployment (prod, uat, etc), rollback, reliability, scalability, disaster recovery, etc)

Nice To Haves:

• Consulting experience / system advocacy
• Experience working within (or for) large enterprise clients
• Expertise in Docker, PostgreSQL, C++, Redis, Atlas, ELK, git, REST, microservices
• Familiarity with public cloud (AWS, Azure), solutions (SaaS/PaaS/hosted) and components (S3, blob storage)
• 7+ years software engineering experience
• Experience with SecDB Core, Athena Core, Quartz Core
• System administration / DevOps experience in addition to software engineering
• Familiarity with financial services industry
• Familiarity with functional programming, dependency graphs