Senior Backend Engineer

MediaLab is a media & technology company focused on acquiring and growing properties and global brands. The organization is a unique combination of private equity, holding company and operating entity. We continue to expand and are proud of the prominent market position of our brands.

Come join an exceptionally talented team of engineers, designers, product and business builders. HQ is located in sunny Santa Monica, California with growing teams in New York, and across cities in the US and Latin America.

Your role at MediaLab

MediaLab is building the Ad Platform of the future to maximize publisher value.

The technical effort involved is massive. MediaLab Engineering supports a growing number of applications across multiple business verticals which have been acquired through a careful selection process to integrate with its internal ads platform that processes billions of impressions a month.

The Engineering team is incredibly talented and includes senior engineers and leads who have experience working in large scale systems. If you've designed complex scalable systems, built powerful and intuitive user interfaces, or worked with great teams on hard problems in consumer products, this is the place for you. 

We are looking for an experienced and motivated Senior Software Engineer to join our dynamic engineering team for the Kik app. In this role, you will be responsible for maintaining and enhancing our existing systems, designing and implementing new solutions, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of our infrastructure. You will have the opportunity to work on complex distributed systems and help shape the architecture of our next-generation platform.

What You'll Do

• Maintain, improve upon, and build the existing codebase written in Java.
• Write unit and integration tests for existing and new features to ensure robustness and reliability.
• Design, implement, and maintain IaC using tools like Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation.
• Automate the provisioning of servers, containers, and services using tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, ArgoCD, and GitHub Actions.
• Review and critique code to identify potential issues, enforce best practices, and ensure code quality.
• Debug and resolve issues in production systems, ensuring uptime and reliability.
• Implement robust security measures and ensure data protection.
• Work collaboratively with developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to deliver scalable solutions.
• Contribute to the design and maintenance of distributed systems and intuitive user interfaces.
• Apply knowledge of event-driven architectures to build responsive and scalable systems.
• Implement and manage monitoring systems using tools like Datadog or New Relic.

What We're Searching For

• 4+ years as a professional software engineer.
• BS degree in Computer Science or a related field is preferred but not required.
• Proficiency in Java with additional experience in Golang being a plus.
• Experience managing AWS and/or GCP infrastructure.
• Proficiency with SQL databases (e.g., MySQL, Postgres) and familiarity with NoSQL databases (e.g., Cassandra, Redis, DynamoDB).
• Experience with tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, and other DevOps-related tools.
• Previous experience working with microservices infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
• A passion for implementing best practices and advocating for smart automation.
• Experience with monitoring tools such as Datadog or New Relic.
• Proven ability to work on distributed systems and large-scale architectures.
• Understanding of event-driven design and implementation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to prioritize multiple projects independently.

At MediaLab, we rely on a range of backgrounds, experiences, and ideas. We value diversity, and we’re proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunity workplace.