Software Engineer, Backend

About Zenly

Zenly was created because we wanted an easy way to know what our friends were doing. Naturally, we created an app - a map that lets you see your friends and what they’re up to. Millions of people around the world have since made us realize that Zenly goes beyond letting you know what your friends are doing. It actually brings you to spend more time with the people who matter most and moves you a little closer to them even when you can’t. We’re a small team of <60 passionate people determined to offer an alternative to products that were meant to connect us but only alienated us. An alternative that represents a true reflection of your world and those you care most about.

Position

As a Backend Engineer you will work in a long-lived dedicated team/squad alongside contributors of all disciplines (Design, Mobile, Product, Scientists, QA). You and your team will be responsible for an overall company goal and will work together at defining the roadmap that will lead to the most impact.

Currently, Backend Engineers are working in teams like Conversation, Growth, Platform, Predictions and Maps to quote only non-internal team names.

Our stack

The Zenly backend is written mostly in Go with a bit of Rust. We have monorepos for both that host standalone services. Communication from and between services is done using gRPC or GraphQL depending on usecases.

The number of technologies we use is fairly limited as we aim to master the inner workings of what we use in production. Our main database is ScyllaDB (C++ drop-in Cassandra alternative), our real time bus is powered by NATS and our durable event bus is built on top of Kafka. 3 pieces of software that we learned (the hard way) to use properly at scale.

Finally, everything runs in GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) and supports 100s of thousands of QPS on less than a 1000 cores. Don't hesitate to look at the SRE job opening for additional information on the infra stack.

PS: The client software that communicates with the server is also written in Go and shares a lot with the backend.

What you'll do as a Backend Engineer:

• Work as part of a long-lived team, helps define and reach objectives that have an impact on the trajectory of Zenly
• Participate in the elaboration and delivery of your team's roadmap and ship features that instantly reach millions of users
• Work hand-to-hand with fellow SREs to design scalable architectures for the features you want to build
• Write technical specifications and submit their design for review and discussion
• Build monitoring dashboards to understand how things are doing in production
• Deploy multiple times a day

Your qualification

• Building user-facing features
• Deep knowledge of Rust
• Exposure to architectural patterns of high-traffic environments
• An appetence for distributed-systems and related problematics
• Conducting performance issues analysis (and resolving them)

What we offer

• Competitive compensation, including RSUs for every permanent employee (this means free Snap shares) 
• Relocation and visa procedures support. We cover all expenses associated with the move and obtaining your visa (if applicable). We’ll even help you find somewhere to call home in Paris
• Lots of vacation: between 30 and 35 paid days off not including bank holidays 
• Allowance boost: in addition to your base salary, we offer a monthly international phone allowance (€95), a monthly well-being allowance (€75), and a monthly lunch allowance (€352)
• 100% reimbursement of your public transportation subscription
• Everything you need to grow in your role and accelerate your learning and development: from the millions of books in our office, to online courses, to coaching. The list is always growing and you can help shape it
• Language classes (Japanese, French, and English)
• 100% coverage of your health insurance for you and your partner
• In addition to the best healthcare system in the world, we offer additional medical, dental and optical insurance for you and your family
• Weekly yoga and meditation classes (in the office or via Zoom)
• Parental leave: between 16 and 26 weeks for new parents (including adoption)
• Nursery/Day Care support. For a smooth transition upon returning to work after your parental leave, we’ve partnered with a nursery/day care organisation to ensure a spot for Zenly parents during the year
• Rest and fun areas: chill zone, ping pong table, climbing wall, green atrium, LOTS of natural light
• Pet-friendly office
• Free drinks and snacks of all kinds (homemade pastry, bread, fruit, etc.) everyday :)
• Fun: regular drinks, and trips abroad every year with the whole team (French Alps, Sicily, Majorca, Marrakesh)