Senior Software Engineer - Backend Developer Experience

Thales of Miletus was an ancient pre-socratic philosopher, and one of the “seven sages”, or the founders of ancient greece. Many regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, breaking from the prior use of mythology to explain the world and instead using natural philosophy.

According to legend (and Aristotle), Thales was challenged by his fellow citizens as to what use his mathematics and natural philosophy was: if his ideas were so powerful, why was he still poor? Surely there had to be some practical use to his theories? 

In response to this, Thales purchased the option to rent all of the olive presses during the next harvest season: based on his astronomical observations of the previous years he accurately predicted that it would be a bumper olive crop. He then became immensely rich during the harvest, when he had an effective monopoly on olive presses, and could set his own prices.

On the Developer User Experience team at Mercury we use a blend of theory and practice to help developers profit. We endeavor to always be looking ahead, at the second order considerations of our growth, and to make smart decisions today that set us up for success tomorrow. Mercury is hiring an experienced Sr. Software engineer to help us create paved paths for the rest of the 150+ engineers.

As a Sr. Software Engineer on Backend DUX, you'll work on a team of incredibly talented engineers in creating a developer ecosystem which delivers speed, quality, and delight for Mercury's engineers. Mercury's primary backend language is Haskell, and your team is composed of industry recognized thought leaders in that community. You'll work alongside other enablement teams whose overarching mission is to achieve startup-like developer effectiveness at scale.

As part of this role, you and your team will:

• Instrument the software development life cycle, ensuring we have effective quantitative and qualitative ways of understanding our engineers’ speed, quality, and enjoyment of their work.
• Use a product-centric approach to improving the effectiveness of our backend engineers through the introduction of novel tools and methodologies.
• Create patches for, and contribute upstream to popular open source projects, such as GHC, GHCi, Persistent, and Nixpkgs
• Create novel solutions and tooling to keep developers in the world’s largest Haskell codebase productive as we scale, often open sourcing these tools where possible
• Embed with product teams to dog food our tooling, and to gain firsthand experience experience from working to deliver features for Mercury’s customers

The ideal candidate for the role:

• You have 3+ years of experience in backend development, you understand the backend stack and contribute to product features if needed. 
• You possess a passion for enabling other engineers, and you feel a great sense of reward as your team’s investments improve engineering velocity and enjoyment. You’re always eager to challenge your own and your team’s assumptions, creating data-backed cases for investments and strategic shifts.
• You’re receptive towards both positive and critical feedback from users, ensuring customer insights drive our decisions as we find new ways to improve engineering speed of iteration and overall experience.
• You enjoy navigating and owning ambiguous problem domains, and have a set of tools that have served you well in effectively communicating your technical plan to others to get buy-in and create alignment.
• You are a thoughtful engineer, who treats others with respect and empathy; you seek to understand people’s whose perspectives are different from your own, and work to find compromise on contentious issues. 

Bonus points:

• You have 2+ years of experience on platform teams that have grown to support hundreds of engineers. You’ve seen issues of scale before, and realize what might work great with 30 engineers might be terrible with 300. 
• You have deep experience with Haskell, or other purely functional languages.
• You have experience working with Nix, NixOs, Nix Packages, etc.
• You have experience working with open source libraries, including successfully contributing upstream patches.

* Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.

We encourage you to try our demo site if you’re interested in applying for the role.

Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

 

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

The salary range for candidates in the US is $203,100 – $238,900.

The salary range for candidates in Canada is CAD $184,400 – 217,400. 

 

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on January 22, 2024. Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.

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