Backend Engineer

What are we looking for, and why

The data landscape is rapidly changing and evolving, and so does the way data engineers and practitioners work: newer and better tools, representation formats and best practices appear every few months.

If we want Tinybird to be the go-to tool for building user-facing applications with real-time data, we need to keep up the pace. And in order to do that, we need to meet data practitioners where they are, providing delightful data integrations for the platforms they're already using (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Kafka, DynamoDB, MongoDB, S3, GSC, etc.). That's what the Integrations team is responsible for at Tinybird.

We are looking for someone for this team with relevant experience building complex data integrations and pipelines and is up for the challenge of building a category-defining product.

Our expectations

You will help us build the integration stack of Tinybird, having a critical impact in the design, architecture and the way we operate all our Connectors. These are the main skills we're looking for, and our expectations for this position:

• You are a highly-experienced Backend engineer building complex data integrations and pipelines. Language is not important, we use Python and C++ today, but we are not tied to anything.
• You have designed and built data integrations and Connector in other SaaS data platforms - or equivalent experience.
• Loves data and SQL
• Bias for action, iteration and delivery. Conscious that often decisions can be reversed quickly and that speed is of the essence in business and technology.
• You are 100% autonomous, don’t need a lot of guidance given the proper context. If there is not enough context you should be able to talk to the right people. That includes being able to reduce scope when needed, unblock things, focus on the right important things and so on.
• You are able to lead an initiative end to end, from conception to the announcement. That includes people management in that initiative.
• You should know all the layers of the stack. Not in detail, but good enough to understand what needs to be changed and who you need to talk with.
• Department lines do not exist for you. If you need to work on something under the umbrella of another department, you just do it.
• You should be able to make technical decisions that affect the product and explain them properly.
• You understand the market and the main use cases from our customers.
• You should be able to lead and solve incidents.
• You should be able to help others to grow without actually doing their work.
• Low level ClickHouse knowledge is a big plus. You should understand how CH stores things, how the cluster is coordinated, pros and cons, good enough to work on a use case and resolve a fire.

Some other things that are important to us:

• You are fluent in English, both written and spoken.
• You communicate well in writing. This is important not only because we favor asynchronous work but also because you will have to write documentation, guides, and the occasional blog post.
• Someone who participates as part of the on-call team, to understand not only our product, but also the issues our clients face.
• You are located somewhere in Europe and at least not too many time zones away. As, for now, our engineering team is entirely in the CET timezone.

How could your typical day look like

In this company, everyone is part of the product team. While your focus will be on Backend development in the Integrations team, the priorities of what you tackle will be mostly driven by the things we want to accomplish with the product.

Depending on the week, you could be working on the priorities for the Integrations team: which means building a new Connector MVP, an iterative improvement for an existing integration or bug fixing. Or, working at the Fast Responders team, which is a team where different members of the Product team work on fixing problems reported by our customers, improving or monitoring features we have just released, or removing some technical debt we identified.

We discuss the product pretty much every day. It needs to balance today’s problems with tomorrow’s, so the vision of someone working with the product to fix real problems is crucial, but the outlook of someone who knows the internals is invaluable to making the right long-term decisions.

Our product design approach is to work backwards: someone proposes a solution to a problem, explains why it's important, describes how it would work, and writes (but doesn’t yet publish) the announcement blog post. Then, everyone else reads it, asks questions, and we decide if that makes sense or not. You'll be part of this, of course. Typically, we build what we call an MSP (“Minimum Shitty Prototype”) that enables us to see very roughly how it would work and to understand the real effort involved in actually shipping it.

Some bits about the way we work

• We are a fully remote company, all of our previous companies were remote-friendly companies, and we intend to remain a remote company.
• Our head office is located in Madrid, we love to see each other and work face to face regularly, feel free to go whenever it suits you. Especially on Wednesday.
• We give you up to 2,400€ to get the right setup at home if you need it.
• We are just starting up so your work will impact everything we do. We also believe in full transparency, and you will always know what is going on.
• Here you have our company principles.

Onboarding

First 30 days

You'll meet the team and key customers, and be briefed in with the mid term goals and roadmap. You'll start participating in all the team dynamics.

After 3 months

You have finished the onboarding, and spent a few weeks working on our Fast Responders teams. That's the best way of getting to know them, and our product: by solving actual customer issues in production using our product.

After 6 months

At this point you are a fully functional team member, and you have participated in a couple of initiatives to improve the product. At this point, you'll be assigned your first initiative, that you'll own end to end.

The Process

We try to simplify the process as much as we can, and we don't like to extend it with any candidate more than two weeks (if the whole process is completed):

• Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a screening call with our tech team.
• Test: simple async test, where there is no limited time (although we encourage to not spend more than 4 hours).
• Second meeting with the team who has reviewed your test to deep dive and comment it with you
• Following successful interviews, you will be invited to schedule a final meeting with at least a member of the founding team.
• Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer.

Compensation

• A competitive package, including Stock Options.
• Up to 90K depending on experience.
• 22 days of holiday a year (plus your birthday and public holidays), but… who's counting?

How to apply

Apply telling us a bit about yourself and your motivations to work in Tinybird. Besides, we are happy to answer  whatever you need to know about the problem we are trying to solve, the company, your role, etc.