Staff Engineer

About Foursquare 

Foursquare is the leading independent location technology and data cloud platform dedicated to building meaningful bridges between digital spaces and physical places. Our proprietary technology unlocks the most accurate, trustworthy location data in the world, empowering businesses to answer key questions, uncover hidden insights, improve customer experiences, and achieve better business outcomes. A pioneer of the geo-location space, Foursquare’s location tech stack is being utilized by the world’s largest enterprises and most recognizable brands.

About the Position

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Places team, you’ll help design and build out the platform, pipelines, tools, and automation systems that power Foursquare’s Places data. We use popular open-source technologies alongside a custom in-house storage and curation platform to cluster, clean, and synthesize data at scale. Our day to day work often involves complex distributed systems problems but we also handle our share of  “small data” solutions and optimizing QA workflows.

Ideal candidates will be excited about implementing robust, data-oriented software systems in production but will also be capable at the messier aspects of digging into data quality problems and turning analysis into clearly communicated summaries and recommendations. In this role your contributions will impact our largest engineering team and one of the company's primary products.

In this role, you’ll

• Develop and design the core Places software platform
• Build systems which enhance the development speed and quality of our industry leading Places data
• Work closely with a team of talented software engineers to ship features
• Have direct customer impact through delivery of rapid improvements to our largest Fortune 500 customers.

What you’ll need

• 7+ years of industry experience building out scalable big data software products
• Strong communication skills both written and verbal, and experience setting the foundational technical direction for a team
• Ability to understand and contribute to unfamiliar systems or areas of the stack.
• Good judgment in design and architecture and technical strategy, including ability to translate requirements into a coherent vision that results in intentional design and practical steps to implementation.
• Persistence in the face of challenges, and ability to drive a project to completion.
• Proficiency with Java / Scala or willingness to learn
• Comfortable in a small and fast-paced startup environment
• Your own unique talents! If you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications outlined above, we encourage and welcome you to still apply!

Nice to Have

• Experience with AWS.
• Experience around data analysis and techniques for evaluating data quality
• Experience working as part of a geographically-distributed team

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Java, Scala, Python, Clojure, Ruby
• Tools for pipeline orchestration: Airflow, Luigi
• Frameworks: Spark, MapReduce, Scalding, Spring Boot
• Infrastructure: AWS, Hadoop, Kubernetes, Docker
• Other technologies: Postgres, Hive, HBase, MongoDB

Benefits and Perks

• Fully Flexible Workplace - work from home, one of our offices or a combination of the two!
• Unlimited PTO - rest and recharge when you need it!
• Industry Leading Healthcare - comprehensive and competitive health, vision, dental, life insurance
• Savings and Investments - 401(k) with company match
• Home Office Setup - you get all necessary hardware and internet reimbursement 
• Family Planning and Fertility Programs - programs via Carrot and Maven
• Employee Resource Groups - to help you stay connected

Things to know…

Foursquare is proud to foster an inclusive environment that is free from discrimination. We strongly believe in order to build the best products, we need a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. This leads to a more delightful experience for our users and team members. We value listening to every voice and we encourage everyone to come be a part of building a company and products we love.

Foursquare is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.