Backend Engineer - AWS, Terraform, Node

About Soot

SOOT is a new way of mapping information. It’s self-organizing, spatial, and incredibly fast. For mapping design files, videos, websites, and moodboards.

About The Role

Requested Intros Looking for a frontend web engineer with experience in web graphics, or a graphics engineer with experience in frontend systems.

What You’ll Do

JOB SPEC Technical Details: Our backend tech stack is built on AWS, managed with terraform. We deploy several node (typescript) and python binaries through ECR and K8s. The binaries communicate with each other using SQS, and store data to a S3 blob store and DocDb data store. We depend on ML tooling (primarily Torch, but increasingly higher level libraries like langchain, huggingface), and we make heavy use of OpenSearch. We utilize an event-sourcing model to support multiplayer and sharing. Most You don't need to be familiar with ALL of these technologies, but you'll probably struggle without some experience with at least a few of these. The SOOT backend is responsible for processing tens of thousands of unique pieces of data quickly while maintaining high availability to support a seamless frontend user experience. This means an intense focus on speed and scale, with an eye towards maximizing parallelism, such that the system can easily consume resources as they become available. The backend is also constantly growing in terms of feature complexity – we are rapidly bringing new features online, all of which support step function improvements to SOOT. Much of the role is about developing coherent abstractions and thinking about data lifecycles. The SOOT backend is responsible for managing a lot of widely varying behaviors, from ML processing to data compression to basic CRUD. To support all of this while ALSO growing our feature list, we heavily focus on reducing complexity.

What You’ll Bring

Prior Technical Experience That We Look For: Distributed systems engineering – in particular, experience with thinking about data lifecycles, inter-process communication, and effective data structure design Database engineering – in particular, experience with maximizing speed for specific high value queries at a system level, scaling to efficiently utilize available resources, and dealing with weak data consistency guarantees Real-time Multiplayer (NICE TO HAVE)– in particular, dealing with concurrent document editing. Heavy preference for folks who have experience with multiplayer servers for video games, but any experience here (including OT or CRDT) is fantastic Other Things We Look For SOOT is a small startup, everyone wears a lot of hats. So we're looking for folks who are capable of programming in diverse settings. We're keeping an eye out for projects in multiple languages/paradigms/frameworks, potentially with different build systems and tooling setups (gradle, npm, pip, Make), deployed in multiple settings (web, cloud, embedded systems, mobile). We love folks who have opinions that are borne out of experience, including non-technical ones. We're keeping an eye out for technical and non-technical writing, presentations, and PRs, issues, and conversations in public repositories and forums. Because we're a small team, we expect a lot of autonomy and independence. We're keeping an eye out for folks who have prior experience building out their own projects, or who have prior startup experience or personal consulting experience. Really any role where you have to deal with a lot of ambiguity and turn it into something magical. And finally, we're looking for folks who will be excited to be with and grow with SOOT in the long run :)