Senior Backend Engineer, Search

Senior Backend Engineer, Search

Location: Remote (US & Canada)

Muck Rack is the leading SaaS platform for public relations and communications professionals. Our mission is to enable organizations to build trust, tell their stories and demonstrate the unique value of earned media. Muck Rack’s Public Relations Management (PRM) platform enables PR teams to work together to find the right journalists for their stories, send customized pitches, build meaningful relationships with the media, monitor news, and quantify their impact.

Founder controlled, fully distributed, and growing sustainably, Muck Rack has received several awards for its unparalleled culture and product from organizations like Inc., G2, and BuiltIn. We value resilience, transparency, ownership, & customer devotion and infuse these values into everything we do.

We’re looking for a collaborative and self-motivated Senior Back End Engineer, Search to join our quickly growing team and make a big impact.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Search & Monitoring Team, you’ll work closely with software engineers, product managers, and designers, to ensure that the content available to our customers meets their expectations. You’ll work on major technical projects with large data volumes, lead the building of new features, and help shape our engineering culture and processes. Our engineers are not siloed to any particular part of the application everyone contributes everywhere. Our tech stack includes Python, Django, Celery, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Vue, and Webpack. Our technology team is focused on scale, quality, delivery, and thoughtful customer experience. We ship frequently without sacrificing work/life balance.

To be set up for success in this role, you’ll need to have:

• 5+ years total professional experience as a software engineer
• Significant experience with Elasticsearch, especially with large data sets
• Experience with various search related tasks, such as indexing and query parsing
• The ability to understand complex domains and define work that consistently delivers value
• A commitment to collaborating closely with other engineers and across functions

If any of the below also describe you, this could be an exciting opportunity:

• Worked on a complex, high-traffic site at a startup or software-as-a-service company, ideally with large amounts of data
• Experience with Python and MySQL (or Postgres)
• Any combination of the following: experience with Celery, Luigi or Airflow, Kafka, AWS, NLP, data model performance tuning, content extraction, application performance tuning
• Familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (like Vue or React) and development patterns
• Interest in journalism, news, media or social media
• Worked in highly collaborative and cross-functional environments.

In addition, we’re always looking for candidates who:

• Have excellent communication skills, with an ability to explain ideas clearly, give and receive feedback, and work well with team members
• Exhibit a willingness to learn in areas where they have less experience with our tech stack
• Take pride in the quality of their code. (Your code should be readable, testable, and understandable years later)
• Work well in a fast-paced development environment with testing, continuous integration and multiple daily deploys
• Have the ability to manage complexity in a large project, and incur technical debt only after considering the tradeoffs
• Take a logical approach to problem solving that combines analytical thinking and intuition

Interview Overview

Below you’ll find an outline of the interview plan for this role. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

• 30 min interview with a member of our Talent Team
• 1 hour zoom interview with the hiring manager
• Take-home coding assignment (2 hours max)
• 30 min code review discussion
• 30 min peer panel interview
• A final 30 min executive interview

Salary

The starting salary for this role is between $140,000 – $170,000, depending on skills and experience. We take a geo-neutral approach to compensation within the US, meaning that we pay based on job function and level, not location. For all other countries, we have competitive pay bands based on market standards.

Why Muck Rack?

Remote Work, Forever. We’re a fully distributed team and have pledged to remain that way forever. We offer employees a full home office setup, phone & internet reimbursement, and a monthly coworking membership. We build culture through virtual and in-person team bonding opportunities including team lunches, friendly competitions, and celebratory events!

Transparent Compensation. We offer competitive geo-neutral pay in the U.S. and review compensation at least once annually to ensure internal equity and alignment with the external market. Depending on the role, we offer either a standardized bonus program or attainable commission structure and an opportunity to earn equity in the company. All employees are eligible for our 401(k) plan* with employer contributions.

Health & Wellness*. Muck Rack provides comprehensive health, dental, vision, and disability insurance for employees and their families. We offer two plans with 100% premium coverage for individuals and 85% premium coverage for dependents, as well as a range of other plans. Our team also has access to OneMedical, 24/7 Virtual Care, an Employee Assistance Program, as well as FSA and HSA options. Team members have access to a quarterly wellness stipend and a free Headspace subscription.

PTO and Family Benefits. Our team enjoys 4+ weeks of off-the-grid PTO, plus paid sick/mental health days, summer Fridays, and 13 paid holidays. In order to combat Zoom fatigue and allow for deep work without interruption, we have implemented No Internal Meeting Fridays year round. We also provide up to 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave.

Personal & Professional Development. We grow talent by creating internal pathways for advancement and promotion. Muck Rack conducts bi-annual performance reviews, hosts team-wide workshops, and offers management training and leadership training opportunities. We also provide unlimited subscriptions to L&D platforms including Coursera & O’Reilly, as well as 2 additional days of PTO to dedicate to learning and development.

Culture of Inclusion. We know that diverse perspectives breed innovation and help us better serve our customers. We are committed to ensuring employees feel their identities are valued and that people of all backgrounds and points of view are treated equitably.

Customer-First. Founder-controlled means we have the freedom to be nimble, highly collaborative and innovative, building forward-thinking products that enable 3,000+ companies around the world to build trust, tell their stories and demonstrate the unique value of earned media.

*These benefits are specific to US-based employees. In some, but not all, cases we are able to offer equivalent benefits to employees located outside of the United States.

If you’re excited about an opportunity at Muck Rack but your experience doesn’t align perfectly with the requirements of the role outlined here, please don’t let it stop you from applying. We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, and we want to hear from you. You may be a great fit for this role or another position on our team. We deliberately encourage individuals from all backgrounds, including race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability status to apply for positions. We are an equal opportunity employer and we’re committed to a fair and consistent interview process and candidate experience.

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