Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

About Drift

Drift is the Conversational Marketing platform that combines chat, email, video, and AI to remove the friction from business buying. With Drift, you can start conversations with future customers now, on their terms -- not days later. There are over 50,000 businesses that use Drift today to accelerate revenue, shrink sales cycles, and make buying easy. Our mission is to use conversations to make business buying frictionless, more enjoyable, and more human.

About Digital First

Drift is a Digital First company, which means Remote is the primary experience for all employees. For the majority of our positions, your location is flexible! If “Remote” is stated in the job location, that role can be located anywhere Drift is authorized to do business in the United States.

Select roles may require you to be located in a city where we have a Conversation Space (currently Boston, MA, San Francisco, CA, Tampa, FL, and London, UK – with more to come across the globe), or work hours associated with a specific time zone. If this is the case, it will be explicitly stated in the job description. Please work with your recruiter and hiring manager to learn more about where Drift is authorized in the U.S. and to determine if you are eligible for employment based on your location.

About the role

We are looking for Staff Engineers who are passionate and ready to tackle some of the most meaningful problems in the industry—from building adaptive AI for bot-supported conversations, to designing next generation chat experiences, to bridging the gap between old and new ways to buy.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll be instrumental in guiding architectural decisions and owning the tech stack within your respective product. As we grow as an organization, we are looking for our systems and applications scale with us and the rapidly growing customers we support.

You may be involved in creating infrastructure that processes billions of messages a minute to extracting buyer intent and priority for conversations. You could also build tools to trace and visualize any message ever sent so our customers can zero in on giving the best buying experience.

Drift Tech Stack - These are not hard requirements

• Java
• Python (Machine Learning, NLP teams)
• AWS
• Docker/Kubernetes
• DynamoDB

Meet some of our leaders!

Whether you're an intern or a principal, you will get to work on hard problems together. We want you to bring out your unique experience and specialities.

• Melissa Leffler , SVP of Engineering, joined January 2019. Melissa is building one of the best engineering teams in the business to take Drift’s products to the next level.
• Bernard Kiyanda , Senior Director of Engineering, joined September 2019. Bernard and his team are instrumental in us expanding to our enterprise customers.
• Ivan Saskor , Director of Engineering, joined October 2020. Ivan and his team are building out solutions to create efficiencies for sales teams to close deals through automation
• Jeff Orkin, Ph.D . , Head of Drift AI Lab. Jeff and his team are responsible for all things AI and building tools using ML and NLP to continuously improve our platform!
• Mate Rakic , Senior Director of Engineering, joined June 2018. Starting out as a Tech Lead at Drift, Mate is now leading a team of engineers to innovate the way companies engage prospective buyers and make the process frictionless across the board.

What we’re looking for

• Passion around being closely involved with product teams to focus on realizing outcomes for our customers.
• Being a technical expert on architectural decisions to help us scale!
• Engineers who enjoy driving best practices by facilitating code reviews and mentoring junior engineers
• Enthusiasm for owning projects from conceptualization to implementation
• Engineers with a sense of creating frameworks and products to enhance the work of others.

You may be a fit for this role if you:

• Can put yourself in the shoes of our customers to unite design & code and craft fantastic experiences
• Enjoy working on the backend, or anywhere it takes to solve problems and delight customers
• If you're exceptional in a few areas (ex: you're a CSS master or distributed systems guru)
• You are a systems thinking and you have experience designing, building and maintaining REST APIs for use in production
• Have architected RESTful services and understand concepts such as batching, versioning, and idempotency
• Are considered an expert of a server side programming language (Java8/ Java11)
• Take pride in creating results quickly by breaking projects down. We execute on small pieces to generate visible results
• Enjoy working with a diverse group of people with different expertise
• Can stitch together many different services and processes together even if you have not worked with them before
• Uphold quality standards in engineering, security, and design

What you’ll be doing on the team:

Day 1 you will

• Use your onboarding time to learn how things work here and to practice writing and shipping software that makes our customers successful
• Start to dig in and get the basics down about our customers
• Learn Drift-specific systems, product information, and review paperwork (we have to get that out of the way).
• Have lunch with your manager and maybe your team

By the end of week 1 you will

• Get to know your customer - Every team at Drift owns a different area of the product and our Customers are a super important ingredient to how we build products!
• Have received a first look into Drift engineering systems, culture and product process through various conversations;
• How Product Works at Drift
• Engineering Path of Success/ Path of Failure
• Auth & Debugging at Drift
• Customer-centered Engineering
• Review of Drift SDLC
• Have transitioned from onboarding to your new team
• Have your local dev environment set up and you will have completed your First-day ship!!!

By the end of month 1 you’ll

• Meet all of your members from Design to Product and Customer Advocate!
• Work with your tech lead to identify the “small rocks” (aka Team Goals) for your first month along with any other goals.
• Also work with your tech lead to develop your list of personal/ professional goals.
• Get an intro to chat duty and how our CA team interacts with our customers on a daily basis.
• Ramp up by engaging in these product processes at Drift;
• Take ownership of a “small rock” from a 1-pager
• Contribute to story time
• Participate in a green-lit kickoff
• Write code toward your “small rock”
• #Shipyard a completed product
• Measure your impact!

Drift is committed to being an equal opportunity employer.

We know that applying for a new job can be intimidating. But guess what? At Drift, there is no such thing as an “ideal candidate.” We believe in the power of teamwork -- and in the desire to learn something new every day. We believe in hiring people, not just skills. Take it from our Founder .

If this sounds like a company you would like to join and a role you would thrive in, please don’t hold back from applying! Whatever skills you bring to the table or background you’re coming from, we welcome you to start a conversation with us. We need your unique perspective for our continued innovation and success. We’re looking forward to learning more about you!

Drift is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected]

In service of various states’ wage disclosure laws: The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently $150 to $190 for US candidates. Through a review of equity with other team members, market data, experience, knowledge, skills and the abilities of the applicant, the level and salary ranges may change. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at a percentage of the base salary.