Who We Are: 

At SpotHero, we work as a team to empower people to get everywhere, easier! We’re rapidly growing with the mission of bringing the parking industry into the future through technology. Drivers across the nation use the SpotHero mobile app or website to reserve convenient, affordable parking in advance, on-the-go or through their connected cars, and parking companies rely on us to help them reach new customers while optimizing their business. We connect the dots with cutting-edge technology, delivering value to both sides of this exciting, evolving marketplace.

Staff Backend Engineer @ SpotHero: 

SpotHero is looking for Staff Backend Engineers to join the Operator League for our Operator Panel Squad - we focus on providing guidance and data driven insights to help our Operators better run their business!

The Operator Panel Squad at SpotHero is responsible for giving the people running parking lots and garages the tools they need to maximize their facilities’ capacity and give drivers the best possible experience at a good price. From utilization dashboards, to sophisticated and flexible rate setting tools, to financial reports, our team strives to give parking facility operators everything they need to be successful. The more operators leverage our tools and metrics, the more it translates to a good parking experience for our customers. We care about quality and SpotHero’s value of #GiveDriversTheRightOfWay, which means to us that we take the “Hero” in our name seriously and we go the extra mile to make sure our drivers have an experience we’re proud of.

You have strong coding skills - you can take on medium to large features with little to no direction from others. You are starting to understand how system design/architecture play into the larger picture of your software craft. You have multiple examples of successful projects that you have worked on and a couple of failed projects that taught what to look out for in future projects.

You will collaborate with management on vision setting, technology direction, architecture, and best practices. The Staff Engineer will contribute to the codebase following set standards and successfully completing stories and have the ability to provide support for any part of the codebase; also able to understand the codebase with minimal direction from others. You will have ownership of code standards, unit and integration testing practices, and technical roadmap. You are a technical educator not a technical dictator.

You will work with the Product Management team to ensure requirements are defined correctly. Ability to successfully architect complex distributed systems and collaborate with more junior engineers to ensure proper implementation of design. You will be an educator who can take the complex and explain it in terms that all audiences understand. Your greatest work will be through others, as you help people level up their technical chops.

Key Responsibilities (What will you do?)

• Identify, design, develop, test, and release high-quality functionality as efficiently as possible.
• You will be an educator, a mentor and coach. People will come to you for advice because you are approachable and you are able to convey your points in a language that they understand.
• Build and maintain tools and services related to product/engineering squad’s goals.
• Work collaboratively with the rest of the Engineering team to deliver quality products with a focus on speed, security, and analytics.
• Independently identify areas for improvement and innovation within the squad ecosystem, and lead the charge on making those changes.
• Be a key hands-on contributor to the design and implementation of new products and features through the entire stack.
• Ownership of a codebase, maintaining it and ensuring it runs consistently.
• Collaborate with all senior and staff level engineers to explore options and help define architecture and design across the engineering organization.
• Ability to move between squads to devise architecture and assist projects in moving forward.
• Educate Software Engineers to work with Distributed architecture and System Design across Systems.
• Function as a leader within the engineering department, providing mentoring and training to all levels of engineering team members.
• Function as an internal expert for technology specialty and educate the team on new and changing technologies.
• Secure and safeguard data to preserve its integrity, reliability, and availability and ensure appropriate access levels are maintained.

Seeking Candidates in:

• Chicago, IL 
• Toronto, ON

The following experience is relevant to us:

• We value humility, a strong work ethic, flexibility, collaboration, technical curiosity, and constant learning.
• Production experience with expert Kotlin Backend skills - Nice to have, not a must. 
• 10+ years experience as an engineer across multiple environments.
• Strong knowledge of Python and Django or Flask
• Strong experience working with relational databases like Postgres and MySQL
• Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills.
• You are comfortable in considering the right Architecture for the right job, as opposed to forcing one approach to all problems
• Knowledgeable of object-oriented and/or functional programming patterns and paradigms
• Knowledge of various API paradigms such as REST and RPC and can implement them within the services you are developing on.
• Ability to work in all areas of the tech stack, including infrastructure through the application layer to client libraries.
• Ability to provide support for any pieces of codebase owned and also understand the codebase with minimal direction from peers or more senior engineers.

Technology we use:

• Our Back End stack is: primarily Python (Django and Flask) web services, some shared, some owned by our own squad. We are moving our main shared application to a modular design, using Domain Driven Design. When relevant we extract specific domains to services currently using Java, Kotlin and GoLang. We also use Docker, deploy our apps via Kubernetes. We use Kafka for asynchronous communication.
• Our Front End stack is: React/Redux, Sass, Jest/React Testing Library/Cypress, and Webpack. We maintain a private npm repository with shareable UI components, utility functions, Babel/ESLint/Prettier configurations, and custom tasks. 
• Our Data stack is: Postgres on RDS for persistence and Redis on ElastiCache for caching and offline task orchestration. We also use Redshift as our data warehouse and S3 as our data lake. We use Airflow and Spark for ETL, as well as do some stream processing (Kafka Streams and Spark at the moment). Our analysts utilize Looker as our Business Intelligence tool. And we use Quicksight for Dashboard on our external Data Products.
• Our Dev Tools stack is: AWS+Kubernetes for hosting. Terraform + Helm Charts for IaaS/Deployment. ConcourseCI for CI/CD. Prometheus/Alertmanager/VictorOps for team alerting. We’re starting to work on multi-region available services.