Senior/Staff Software Engineer – Engineering Productivity

About us

We are building a virtual universe which fundamentally improves how people interact online.

Today, that means a powerful remote-social platform. We already have people working out of our office spaces, attending our virtual conferences, or going to school on our campus spaces. We have folks hosting everything from magic conventions to artist EP launches to thanksgiving dinners, and even a few weddings.

The mission of Gather is to remove physical constraints on peoples' lives, and provide a virtual world which surpasses the real one in interconnectedness, personal touch, and expressiveness.

Role Overview:

The mission of Gather’s Engineering Productivity team is to make building Gather as easy as possible.

The Engineering Productivity (EngProd) team enables Gather’s engineering team to work fast and with ease. The team builds and maintains code, tooling, and automation, and works cross-functionally with all engineering teams. Engineers on this team bring a product mindset and deep care to reduce friction for our end users: the engineering team. 

Examples of things EngProd is responsible for:

• Monorepo code structure and strategy
• Company-wide build system
• Release automation tooling and strategy
• Local development experience
• Observability tooling and best practices
• Testing tooling and automation

Gather's Tech Stack

Gather is written in Typescript and uses a monorepo to house

• A frontend (React – built with Webpack)
• An HTTP backend (Node.js)
• A game service to handle real-time game state updates (Node.js)
• A video service to power live video chat (Node.js)

Gather’s services are dockerized and deployed to a Kubernetes environment in preview, staging, and production.

A few focus areas today we could use a hand with

• Build system – help overhaul our entire codebase build system to make Gather’s codebase builds super fast and consistent! 
• Local development – making the local development experience fast, reliable, and intuitive.
• Testing and Releases – making our testing and release tooling run quickly and provide developers immediate feedback, enabling rapid iteration, and allowing developers to ship with confidence
• Observability – help build fundamental abstractions and share best practices to leverage observability across engineering

Where you will make an impact:

• Software Engineering experience in TypeScript with a background in either full-stack engineering with experience/passion for building systems and developer tooling, or developer experience, developer infrastructure, tooling, productivity, build tooling, platform tooling, or related background
• Deep TypeScript language and tools knowledge
• A love for learning and growing yourself and the team around you
• Strong collaboration and communication skills
• Excitement for a fast-paced, high-growth environment
• Interest in working closely with the Office of the CTO and other teams on engineering-wide productivity initiatives
• Passion for Gather and our mission to build a metaverse for all

What you bring:

• Experience with distributed systems fundamentals
• Experience working with systems or infrastructure components at a great scale
• Experience working with Typescript and NodeJS
• A keen intuition for well-designed software and well-written code
• Intrinsic motivation and the drive to solve difficult problems without guidance
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• A healthy tolerance for the chaotic balance between Doing Things Right and iterating and shipping quickly

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience working remotely
• Manager of one
• Experience with monorepo build tools (Nx, Rush, Turborepo, Lerna, Bazel, Gradle, Lage, etc.)
• Experience with browser build tooling (Webpack, ESBuild, Babel, etc.)
• Experience with infrastructure technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with Continuous Delivery & Continuous Integration pipelines (e.g. CircleCI, GitHub Actions)

Benefits

• Work remotely out of a state-of-the-art virtual office!
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and meaningful equity
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their dependents
• 401k and matching program
• Generous PTO policy and mental health days to recharge
• Meal stipend twice a week to keep you nourished
• Remote work, education, and health & wellness stipends
• Support for family planning & gender-affirmation
• The opportunity to join a passionate team in building something that actually makes peoples' lives better, every single day

Gather is committed to building an inclusive and equitable workplace for individuals of all backgrounds. We strive to build a workplace where employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work, everyday. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy or parental status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Additionally, we're committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please notify the recruiter you are working with. We also ask that all applicants consider answering the voluntary demographic questions on our job application to help us track the inclusivity of our recruiting efforts and programs. Answering these questions is entirely voluntary and your answers will not be shared with the hiring team and will not impact the hiring decision.