Middleware Engineer

OpenSlate analyzes over 600M videos and 4M creators, spanning YouTube, Facebook and TikTok daily. Our data measures content quality, subject matter, brand safety and suitability. Our applications enable the world’s biggest brands to align with social content that works best for each of their unique needs. We are the leading analytics company in the video ecosystem and provide all major media agencies with programmatic solutions.  OpenSlate is regularly featured as a definitive source of safety and suitability in the Wall Street Journal, Ad Age, Digiday, AdExchanger and other digital media industry publications.

Working with user-generated content at scale poses a number of unique challenges.  We highly value creative technical minds that can imagine solutions and bring them to reality.  We’re looking for experienced middleware engineers who would enjoy the challenge of designing and building applications to provide insights into a highly dynamic and expansive data set.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building scalable systems that can collect, store, retrieve and transform data coming from a variety of different sources including APIs, Postgres, Solr, and S3.
• Designing and implementing maintainable APIs that support our end-user applications.
• Selecting appropriate data storage and retrieval methods and technologies.
• Designing data-structures and optimizing queries that deal with millions of rows of data.
• Creating reusable and maintainable code, automated tests, and clear documentation.
• Optimizing your code to run in a high-performance real-time environment that generates billions of events a day.
• Supporting the software and systems you write and deploy in our production environment.
• Collaborating across engineering, product and data teams to solve technical and business issues. 

Requirements

• Experience building non-trivial, data-centric  applications and APIs in a Linux environment.
• Thorough understanding of common Internet networking technologies including TCP, HTTP, DNS.
• Expertise working with RDBMS, including schema design, writing SQL for complex multi-table queries and optimizing query performance.
• Expertise in using Git and Git branching models.
• You enjoy working as a part of a collaborative team and demonstrate an open mindset.
• Strong communication skills: able to clearly articulate, defend and document design decisions and work with a cross-discipline team.
• A love of problem solving and a sense of imagination!

Ideal candidates will also have the following:

• Experience designing and implementing scalable systems that process large amounts of data
• 2+ years building back-end services and APIs in Django or Flask
• Experience designing schemas for efficiently indexing and searching content in Solr or Elasticsearch
• Familiarity with AWS (specifically EC2, ELB, EBS, S3, and R53)
• Experience working with RabbitMQ, Spark
• Familiarity with GitHub and its workflow is a plus.