Staff Engineer

The Role

A Staff Engineer is a technical lead role and senior member of our Engineering teams. A Staff Engineer is an in-team technical specialist whose primary focus is to design and build fit-for purpose solutions whilst strengthening the health of the technical systems/platforms/products within the team. As a technology leader, you are accountable for the overall technical alignment, engineering quality, health, capability and productivity of team. You will drive continuous improvement and customer outcomes.

You demonstrate passion for your craft by having in-depth technical understanding of the codebase/systems/tools/platforms in the team in which you work.

Key partners include:

• Engineering Manager
• Product Managers
• Engineers
• UI/UX Designers
• Commercial Excellence Team

Key responsibilities include:

• Ensure systems are fit for purpose, well architected and follow SEEK development practices.
• Lead the team in exemplifying the development of clean, well-tested, readable software, applying secure coding practices, current patterns, and tooling, while also fostering secure system design.
• Drive platform health by ensuring that our systems are aligned to SEEK’s technical practices & metrics.
• Uplift and embed technical practices in the Engineering team, design and lead a DevOps Culture.
• Ensures team alignment to SEEKs security principles.
• Support the Engineering Manager in Capacity Planning, Risk Management, scoping and prioritisation of technical work and being a point of contact for technical solutions.
• Help facilitates the balanced tension between the desire for immediate delivery and the long-term viability of the code bases.
• Consider customer outcomes and how the systems connect to their needs.
• Strengthen team member technical capabilities through technical coaching, mentoring, instruction and example behaviour.

Requirements

Experience

• Leading a diverse & agile software engineering team
• Improving how we build, deploy and maintain working quality software
• Crafting and operating highly scalable, available, performant and secure solutions
• Growing engineers personal and technical skills through coaching and mentoring
• Architected, built, and operated highly scalable, available, performant and secure solutions
• Led operational support duties, including on-call support and after hours work as the need arises

Personal Skills

• Influences and motivates others, with a positive demeanour and clear sense of initiative
• Self-aware and proactive on continuous improvement and continual learning
• Comfortable looking after uncertainty and working in a fast-paced environment
• Breaks problems down, analyses constituent parts, proposes and delivers creative solutions
• Pragmatic, collaborator with a growth mindset
• Clear communicator who is able to handle
• collaborator expectations, facilitate groups and resolve conflicts
• Focuses on outcomes over outputs
• Builds trust, safety and inclusion in teams
• Uses data to drive decision making
• Capable of rapidly generating ideas and initiatives, accompanied by proof of concept.

Technical Skills

• Proven experience building and maintaining software written in TypeScript, Node JS & React.
• Uses current technical practices such as writing clean, testable code and pair programming
• Proven understanding of highly available systems and web scale architecture with knowledge of clean architecture, clean code and domain-driven design
• Design, develop, support and maintain cloud (AWS) native applications
• Experience developing systems which efficiently use AWS services such as ECS, EKS, SNS, SQS, Lambda, Event-Bridge, CloudFormation & CDK
• Experience with database technologies including MongoDB & DynamoDB
• Experience in creating and maintaining continuous delivery pipelines such as Buildkite
• Experience with integration testing
• Creates software using secure coding practices and mitigates common vulnerabilities
• Experience working with monitoring & observability tools such as Datadog & Splunk

Desirable Qualifications, Skills and Experience

Experience

• Leading lean thinking & agile practices
• Service reliability engineering
• Supporting product experiments and hypothesis driven development
• Setting technical practices and processes that enable performing software teams.
• An interest in software testing or UI Component Libraries.
• Experience in recruiting and retaining talent

Personal Skills

• Influences and motivates others
• Drives a culture of continual improvement
• Visualises technical complexity to mixed audiences
• Improves others through guiding and providing regular feedback