Wistia is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our team! This role is a great opportunity to work closely with a thoughtful, creative and collaborative team working on exciting products that make business more human with video.
You’ll work on the core of Wistia’s back-end media product, providing our customers with a world-class experience for managing video and audio, launching it to audiences, and analyzing its performance. You’ll work primarily in our modern tech stack with Go, Ruby, ffmpeg, Docker, and Kubernetes while building on our collection of platform services.
We’re a diverse and inclusive engineering team. We’re technology-minded, but customer focused, always aiming to deliver the highest-impact features that prioritize the long-term success of the product.
Key Responsibilities
- Work comfortably in back-end micro-service development generally related to ingesting, encoding, and delivering video, image, and audio files. We mainly use Go, but sometimes need to work in both Ruby or JavaScript. We aim to use the best language for the problem we’re trying to solve and do not expect engineers coming in to know our particular frameworks.
- Balance technical considerations with product and business thinking. You aim for the best value, not for perfection.
- Ship features and deliver value to customers under the constraints of a profitable business where we center the customer and take ownership as company values.
- Work with engineers across teams on more complex features, for mentoring and knowledge-sharing, to support and care for the Wistia systems, and sometimes just for fun!
Preferred Qualifications / Experience
- You may be more focused on the back-end and/or service-oriented architecture with an eye for high impact optimizations.
- You have experience with video-based infrastructure and open source projects in the space (ffmpeg, x264, webm).
- You’ve worked with CDNs to deliver assets to customers globally.
- You’ve built integrations with cloud services (AWS, GCP, etc) and APIs in a scalable manner that allow for others on the team to contribute effectively.
- Your experience with distributed databases has given you a real understanding of the CAP theorem in practice (and where they can fall apart)
Qualifications
- You have 8+ years' experience as a product or platform engineer.
- You are a collaborator. Whether through pair programming, a (virtual) whiteboard session, or a casual conversation, collaboration helps the best ideas and practices to proliferate.
- You have strong communication skills. Each of us has only part of the overall picture in our head at a given time. Explaining ideas at an understandable level of abstraction is critical to achieving a shared vision.
- You're empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Sometimes things don't go smoothly. A customer gets frustrated, or a coworker does something that bothers you. Understanding where others are coming from, and being in control of and deliberate about how you respond to them, empowers you to solve problems while also being supportive of and sensitive to those around you.
- You write clean and understandable code. We write code for each other and for our future selves. Code that is clear and tested sets us up for speed, reliability, and a more enjoyable development experience.
- You know your fundamentals. Fads and frameworks come and go. We’re less worried that you know the Next Hot Thing™ than that you feel comfortable with the underlying data structures, algorithms, languages, and protocols that make web applications work.
- You are comfortable thinking in trade-offs. Some decisions will always have a downside. Do we want our distributed database to be more consistent, or more available? Should we use a hosted product that will save us time now, but force us to move to a new system in a year? Understanding and negotiating these choices is critical to success here.
- You value simplicity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one." Making things simple and elegant is deceptively difficult, but it’s worth the effort because the result is easier to understand and work with.
Working at Wistia
We try to ensure Wistia is an inclusive and diverse place where everyone feels happy, fulfilled, respected, comfortable, and welcome. We're proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We care a lot, so our benefits are actually benefits, not just the fun stuff like swag and snacks in the office (though we also have lots of those too!).
We know the biggest investment we can make is in our employees, so we provide:
- A competitive compensation package that includes internal equity stock options
- 401k with 3% company contribution, regardless of whether you contribute
- Fully paid healthcare, dental, and vision insurance (family plans included)
- Pre-Tax FSA and Dependent Care Account
- Fitness reimbursement
- Flexible working hours – work at the times when you operate best, or set aside time for child and/or elderly care responsibilities during traditional “office hours”
- 16 weeks paid parental leave for all new and expecting parents
- Flex PTO (pretty common for people to take 4+ weeks off throughout the year)
- Remote-first culture (work from anywhere in the U.S.)
- Annual professional development stipend (courses, conferences, and more)
- New hire bonus to enhance your home office set up
- Pet insurance discount
Location/Remote Opportunities
Wistia is a remote-first company. Employees can work from our beautiful office in Cambridge, MA, or anywhere in the continental US.
