Missions Staff Engineer, Ably
Cloud infrastructure and APIs for realtime data delivery
Job no longer available
Cloud infrastructure and APIs for realtime data delivery
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
101-200 employees
Company mission
To power and accelerate the real-time revolution.
Role
Who you are
- Experience leading cross-functional teams through coaching and mentoring and making technical decisions to drive projects forward
- Systems design expertise, with an understanding of high level architectural considerations around performance, scalability and reliability
- Experience with multiple programming languages including solid skills with JavaScript/TypeScript and at least one statically-typed compiled language like Golang
- Experience working with a range of technologies across the stack, including (but not limited to) AWS, databases, networks, caches, web technologies
- A strong intuition for high-quality API design and appreciation for great developer experiences
- A product mindset, with a strong focus on customer outcomes and the ability to quickly comprehend and convert business requirements into technical solutions
- A pragmatic approach; the ability to quickly and successfully embrace change and adapt effectively in response
- Experience in dynamic, early stage startups where adaptability and resourcefulness are crucial
- A transparent and collaborative “build in the open” mindset
- Passion for the art of software development and modern trends that shape how developers work
- Excited at the prospect of being entrepreneurial and driving innovation in new product areas for a developer-first product
Desirable
- Experience building developer-first products
- Experience working on multiplayer, collaborative applications
- Experience of distributed systems and concurrent programming
- Experience with products that are brought to market primarily through a product led growth approach
What the job involves
- As a Staff Engineer you'll act as Technical Lead and spearhead one of those missions, working extremely closely with a core team composed of a Product Manager and a team of mission engineers, with additional support from product marketing, developer education, interaction design, and platform technology teams
- You will leverage your technical expertise to solve difficult technical problems, solving those problems by delivering APIs and software to our developer customers, with a hands-on approach. But you will also be a leader who thinks about the business impact of the work
- Drive architectural decisions to successful conclusions. You’ll play a lead role in making strategic architectural decisions that have a significant impact on Ably's products and systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability
- Build innovative solutions. You’ll work together with a talented group of skilled engineers to ideate and build innovative solutions to complex problems, such as:
- Building a fault-tolerant, high-throughput database streaming application for event-driven architectures,
- Designing and implementing intuitive APIs and tooling for building delightful multi-user collaborative experiences
- Developing powerful features like chat-room moderation that enable developers to build live chat applications at planet scale
- Learn from fast-moving experiments to shape new features. You’ll foster a culture of experimentation and continuous learning within the team, leveraging insights to inform the evolution of the product
- Design developer-friendly APIs and SDKs. You’ll help build products that are intuitive, easy to use and delight developers, helping them experience success with the Ably’s features easily
- Be driven by “Developer First” principles. You’ll collaborate closely with the mission Product Manager and other stakeholders to develop a deep understanding of the needs of developers and how to solve their most important problems
- Mentor, coach and lead. You’ll help develop team members, nurturing their growth and help advance their skills
- Engage with the developer community. You’ll actively engage with the developer community, both directly and indirectly, to gather feedback, establish relationships, and promote Ably’s solutions
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Ably's realtime APIs expose the entire Ably infrastructure to developers, making it easier to integrate real-time data flows and therefore to power functionality at any scale.
Developers are increasingly looking to utilise real-time data to facilitate new kinds of services e.g in the Internet of Things or monitoring stock prices. Introducing massive flows of realtime data has previously been technically difficult.
The company believes its product is set apart from other real-time platform-as-a-service providers because it features out-the-box products that are developer-friendly as well as secure.
The company expresses this developer-friendly approach through a variety of channels, including masterclasses as well as products like its unique offering of reliable message ordering. In 2023, it partnered with Netlify Integrations Hub.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-27% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Aug 2025
$71.3m
LATE VC
Jun 2021
$70m
SERIES B
Total funding: $149.3m
Company benefits
- A great company culture where every individual is valued and supported
- Share options. We believe that all Ablyans should share in our success and growth
- We’ll support your professional development with a £1000 annual learning budget and up to 10% learning and development time
- We’re remote first, so you can work flexibly in a way that fits your lifestyle. You’re also welcome to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London if you want to collaborate in-person or socialise with the team
- Fully-paid quarterly summits, where we take a few days to step back as a team and a company, to have some fun together and work on things we might not have time for day-to-day
- Your choice of high quality tech kit to work on
- Home workstation set up budget of £500, plus an annual top-up of £150
- Regular company away days and social events
- Weekly individual drinks and snacks budget
- Private healthcare, 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme and life assurance
- Access to private and confidential coaching with Sanctus
- A monthly wellbeing budget with Juno
- A matching pension contribution of 5%
- Life Assurance and Income Protection with Canada Life
- Financial Coaching with Octopus MoneyCoach
- A Cash Plan with SimplyHealth
- 27 days of paid annual leave plus a day off on your birthday (36 days including bank holidays)
- 10 days of paid sick leave (including mental health days) per year
- Dog friendly office for when you’re in the office!
Company HQ
London, UK
Leadership
Matthew O'Riordan
(CEO)Founded easyBacklog and CTO/co-founder of Econsultancy. They are the technical advisor of Guild and are currently the Governing Board Member for OpenAPI Initiative.
Paddy Byers
(Chief Scientist)Earned an MA in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science before pursuing a career as a software technologist including as a CTO at Tao Group and Founder of UbiApps.
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