The Demand Engineering team enables fast and reliable delivery of Slack to our 14M+ globally distributed daily active users.

We design, implement and run Ingress load balancing and traffic management, including our own fleet of software load balancers and management of cloud load balancing infrastructure, plus DNS and CDN. Our Internal load balancing is managed via service discovery and service mesh.

Slack’s infrastructure is always evolving to support our fast-growing business. Demand Engineering’s roadmap is aimed at improving ease-of-use of our infrastructure by providing our developers' features such as blue-green deployments out of the box.

We are a small team making a large impact. We rapidly iterate and work closely with other teams in engineering ensuring resilient systems built to scale. We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability should be primary aspects of the systems that we build. We are ambitious, independent, and pragmatic.

Reliability is Slack’s most critical feature! Accordingly, Demand Engineering is responsible for systems vital to Slack’s availability. We work to make our systems scalable, efficient, and operating according to our high standards in production. We also partner with other engineering teams to find solutions to improve end-to-end customer experience in Slack.

Slack has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture — we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?

About the Role

This is a full-time staff engineering position based in EMEA.

What you will be doing

• Designing tools that, as developed will process performance data we collect from millions of our global users enabling the compilation of a precise metric based map of the Internet as it relates to Slack

• Designing and implementing scalable and reliable traffic delivery infrastructure

• Designing, building, maintaining and operating production systems that balance traffic across our edge regions and various backend services

• Operating systems that protect our network from DDoS attacks

• Crafting and building tools that will utilize this map to improve our DNS routing decisions in order to optimize Slack user experience and achieve even higher levels of availability and lower latency

• Automating operational traffic workflows, building automation and eliminating toil

What you should have

• Lawful permanent residency within the EMEA countries listed above

• You've lead teams or projects/cross functional efforts for 3+ years

• You’ve been building web applications professionally for 5+ years
  A solid understanding of fundamental networking

• A mentoring mindset and love to model modern methodologies for unit tests, code review, design documentation, debugging, and troubleshooting

• Ability to analyze and optimize efficiency in high-traffic internet applications

• Proven track record of building tooling, automation and/or services in one or multiple languages (e.g. Go, Ruby, Python, C/C++)

• Strong interpersonal skills, e.g. ability to convey complex technical concepts to designers, support, and other engineers is something you are used to

Qualifications

• Experience with TCP/IP, DNS, and network-related protocols

• Experience with Linux / Unix operating on high volume systems at scale

• Experience with configuring and operating traffic management components such as load balancers, web, DNS and proxy servers in production

• Experience running deployment automation/configuration management systems at scale -- e.g, Chef, Puppet, Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation or others

• Experience with algorithms, data structures, complexity analysis, distributed systems and software development

• Degree or equivalent relevant experience required. Experience will be evaluated based on the core competencies for the role (e.g. extracurricular leadership roles, military experience, volunteer roles, work experience, etc.)