Staff Software Engineer (backend)

About Tines

Founded in 2018 with co-headquarters in Dublin and Boston, Tines powers some of the world's most important workflows. Our intelligent workflow platform applies AI, automation, and integration with human ingenuity to drive real business results. Tines serves a diverse range of customers, from startups to public companies, including Canva, Databricks, Elastic, Kayak, Intercom, and McKesson. As an integrator across the entire tech stack, Tines is vendor-agnostic integrating with any API-enabled service. This flexibility enables our customers to achieve their highest-priority goals faster. And because Tines is secure and private by design, it’s popular with security, IT, engineering, finance, and other security-focused teams.

At Tines, we're driven by our values of Simplicity, Speed, and Soundness. We're committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences while fostering a company culture that nurtures individual curiosity, growth, and integrity. We’re excited about what’s next, and we’re looking for others to join us on our journey.

Role Overview

You’ll join the team primarily responsible for scaling the throughput and performance of the backend job processing system and code execution engines that power Tines’ intelligent workflows. However, since we’re still a small but growing software engineering organization, this role is not strictly limited to any single part of our product or stack.

This role is about more than writing code: you'll have an influential voice in shaping our technical direction, our product, and our culture. We have a hugely supportive and collaborative engineering team that takes great pride in the work we do and the challenges we solve. We’re eager to help grow and nurture each other’s abilities and also create an environment where we have the ability to do our very best work.

Location

You can work fully remotely from anywhere in EST states, with a preference for the Boston area. You can make use of our Tines office space in Boston to meet up with other members of the engineering team when you wish.

In This Role, You’ll

• Lead the technical direction for some of Tines’ most critical systems.
• Make valuable changes in our codebase in your first week, and see them live in production minutes after merging them.
• Shape how jobs and code are executed at the very heart of our application, to help us power the world’s most important workflows.
• Write and review high-quality, well-tested code to ensure that we’re creating a stable product for our customers, and a stress-free codebase for ourselves.
• Identify areas for improvement, both in our codebase and in how we work, and share the responsibility of making our team better.
• Own the problems you’re solving - and the software you write to solve them - all the way to production and beyond, responding to customer feedback to improve those solutions.
• Use your knowledge to mentor other engineers in our team, providing support and guidance to help them grow their abilities.

Projects You Might Work On

• Build robust, high-availability systems that can support massive data throughput requirements.
• Improve action throughput to meet our growing customers’ scale.
• Create internal and customer-facing controls that allow Tines and our customers to configure job prioritization levels, ensuring the most critical workflows are executed in a timely manner.
• Build features that allow customers to execute code in our product.
• Ensure customers’ jobs are executed in a balanced and fair manner, particularly on multitenant stacks.
• Write a blog post to share something interesting we learned with the community.

Is this role right for you?

• Typically 10+ years as a professional software engineer. Proven track record of success as a staff software engineer.
• Linux systems expertise in namespaces, file descriptors, Unix sockets, mounts, networking, and process isolation.
• Experience with container runtimes, orchestration, or code execution platforms.
• Filesystem and storage experience, including POSIX behavior, content-addressed storage, and crash recovery.
• Experience in building and owning low-level system primitives in Rust or Go.
• Strong debugging skills: able to build focused reproducers for complex kernel, runtime, and storage issues, and use logs, traces, metrics, and tests to isolate root cause.

Your abilities matter, not your education or exactly where you’ve worked. We just need you to show us that you have accumulated the foundational skills and knowledge needed to succeed. This role is broad, not specialized. While your main focus will be on our backend job processing system and code execution engines, you’ll work across our stack, from infrastructure changes to the frontend. You don’t need to have experience in all of these areas, but you will need to be excited to pitch in anywhere when needed, with the support of your teammates. This allows us to be more effective as a team, and provides a lot of opportunities for you to learn.

We’re focused on the most important problems, not the most interesting ones. Your time and energy are limited, so in order to succeed you’ll need to spend it where it will make a difference. We view technologies as a means to an end, and stick to simple, common tools - Ruby, Rails, React, TypeScript, Rust, Go, Postgres, Redis, AWS CDK, and Docker. Engineer productivity is hugely important to us. We invest heavily in developer experience and care deeply about things like build times and flakey tests. We’re constantly evaluating and refining our use of LLMs to make us more effective in building our product. We work healthily and sustainably. We work reasonable hours, we take our holidays and we plan our workloads realistically. No matter how excited we get by a project, it’s more important to not get burnt out from overwork.

Your contributions will be obvious. On a small team like ours, you don’t have to spend a ton of time and energy making sure your work is seen - your impact will be clear to everyone.

We’re building an inclusive, supportive team. We have a wonderfully wide spectrum of colleagues at Tines, and we treat them all with kindness and respect - we expect that you will too. We don’t hire people that treat their colleagues badly, no matter how talented they are.

Target salary range: $230,000-$250,000 plus equity

At Tines, we’re all about trying new things and taking the leap. If you’re second-guessing your application, we hope you’ll trust your gut and take the leap too! Applying for a new job isn’t always easy, especially if you’re thinking of a career pivot – but we’re big believers in learning and growth here at Tines, so you’ve nothing to worry about. A variety of experience, perspectives, and voices makes us the company we are. We’d love to hear from you.

Tines provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation.

Key skills/competency

• Staff Software Engineer
• Backend Systems
• Performance Scaling
• Job Processing
• Code Execution
• Linux Systems
• Rust
• Go
• High-Availability Systems
• Debugging