Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Team

Gatsby’s Cloud Team is a small team with a million interesting problems to solve. Help us create a true cloud-native website framework with seamless, intuitive transitions between local and cloud environments — and change the future of the web.

About Us
Gatsby is a remote-first, community-focused team working to build a high-performance, fun to use, astonishingly flexible presentation layer for any data source. Our core values include transparency (we work in public most of the time); creating a safe, high-trust team; building incredible developer experiences; maintaining a healthy working environment; and helping deliver web experiences that feel amazing to use on every device and connection type.

Details of the Role
Type of Work: Full-time employee
Location: Remote (US or International). Preference for UTC-8 to UTC+4.

Your Opportunity
As a core member of our growing team, you will work closely with the rest of our engineering and product teams to turn ideas into tangible products. Your strong systems and API design skills, operations experience, and ability to deliver projects with multiple stakeholders will move the Gatsby platform forward.

Why we’re hiring
Gatsby is growing fast, and we want to build products that make our user’s projects easier to manage, scale, and improve. The Cloud Team is small with a million interesting problems to solve.

The team’s mission is to extend Gatsby into the cloud — create everything that Gatsby will or could need in the cloud. This includes:

• Creating a supercharged, specialized compiler in the cloud. Features like incremental and parallel builds, GraphQL backends and image processing as a service will help establish
• Enhance individual developer productivity by enhancing their workflow. From generating a new version of a Gatsby site every time a developer saves a file, to visual diffing between versions of Gatsby sites.
• Enable team collaboration on Gatsby projects, especially including non-technical team members. Building on the Gatsby Preview product, and upcoming CI functionality create features like commenting on live previews, CI reports & dashboards visualizing performance, accessibility, and link checking on a per-commit basis.

Each of these goals — each of these features — need extensive backend work and creative, thoughtful user-focused front-end development. This is far above and beyond what our users are expecting — but exactly what they need.

The goal is to create a seamless, intuitive transition between local and cloud environments, between individual workflows on their own machine and hosted compute jobs in the cloud.

You’ll be working closely with product and design, and working alongside and helping mentor team members, in order to realize this vision.

Some day-to-day responsibilities:

• Create product APIs. As the team builds feature by feature, your role will be to design and build the APIs and services. We use GraphQL and Node.js as our primary platform.
• Provision and manage cloud infrastructure. You will provision and manage our infrastructure, implement internal access control, auditing etc. We run on Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine, with Terraform, Postgres, etc.
• Service infrastructure and operations. You will help define the patterns and ways in which Gatsby adopts microservices and a service-oriented architecture company-wide. You will help build out company-wide initiatives like service meshes, request tracing, and improved observability.
• Mentorship & team development. As an experienced member of the team you’ll coach and guide less experienced members of the team, contribute to the code review process, and help set and maintain a culture of quality throughout the development process.

Experience you should have:

• Expertise in JavaScript (ES2015+) and/or TypeScript. The Gatsby Cloud team is a JavaScript team with multiple Node.js backend applications and a React frontend, so strong familiarity with the language is important.
• Experience building and shipping production code in a team setting. Deep-seated drive for writing high-quality code.
• Experience building APIs for other software engineers. We primarily use GraphQL, but welcome applications with strong general API design skills.
• Working knowledge of a database system. Could probably diagram Postgres’s architecture with a bit of thought (don’t worry, that’s not an interview question!).
• Battle scars running internet-facing, production systems. Operational knowledge of Linux, HTTP, and the ability to troubleshoot problems anywhere across the stack.

Experience it would be nice if you had, but isn’t required:

• You’ve used GraphQL before. You may have experimented a bit with GraphQL on a personal toy project. We use GraphQL heavily at Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud, so it’s a plus to have some level of familiarity.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes. You may not deeply understand Kubernetes, but you may have used kubectl before to check out logs or restart a pod.

The best parts of this job:

• You’ll be at the cutting edge of website development — working on one of the fastest-growing site-building frameworks on the market.
• You’re on the cutting edge of platform engineering. You’ll acquire and gain a deep understanding of working with Kubernetes, Istio, and Elastic Cloud.
• An incredible team to learn from and mentor. From domain experts to incredibly talented early-career developers, the Gatsby Cloud Team is a team that you will be challenged by and that you will challenge. It’s a team that will reward your hard work by shipping incredible features more quickly than you thought possible. A team that wants you to thrive here and can’t wait to see what you can do.
• Challenging technical problems. Scaling, container orchestration, running untrusted code at scale. These challenging engineering endeavors and problems are complex, but rewarding and oh so fun.

The worst parts of this job:

• Shifting context. You may necessarily have to shift context and dive into a different feature before the current one is done. It may even be in an area of the code base you’re unfamiliar with or don’t have a ton of understanding about.
• We move quickly, but don’t sacrifice quality. We ship. Early, often, and quickly. You may not be initially comfortable with the cadence we ship features and improvements to end users.

Benefits we offer:

• 3 months of paid parental leave covering both adoption and foster placement
• Unlimited vacation policy, with a minimum of 15 days paid vacation time
• Amazing health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family (US only)
• Skip the commute with remote work
• Fly to cool locations 3x/year for company-wide meetups
• Stock options in a fast-growing startup
• Gatsby Sabbatical: 4 weeks paid vacation after 4 years tenure