Search Backend Engineer

deviantART, Inc. is looking for an experienced software engineer to join the rest of our backend team in Vancouver, BC.

We are an Alexa top-150 site and home to the largest arts community on Earth, with tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions of works of art.  Our small backend team is responsible for the systems that power deviantART.com, as well as for designing next-generation technologies for content discovery and delivery.  As the newest member of this team, you'll be working directly with other senior engineers and data scientists; you will not have to report to any non-technical managers.

The newly-opened deviantART Canada office is located in the vibrant Gastown district of downtown Vancouver.  If you like the idea of working in a historic brick-and-timber office within seconds of walking, cycling, and rapid transit connections, and with stunning ocean and mountain views, then we think you'll enjoy it here!

We're looking for someone who can:

• Participate in the design, development, deployment and ongoing management of core backend systems
• Understand the end-to-end design, implementation, configuration, and operation of our search infrastructure
• Take responsibility for improvements in software scalability, performance and reliability

Here's a sample of what our backend team has done lately:

• Built a recommender system drawing on each of our hundreds of millions of unique works of art.
• Launched a new algorithm for automatically identifying and promoting high-quality art from the more than 100,000 pieces submitted each day.
• Designed a faceted browse system that dynamically adapts to users' search queries in real time
• Developed a service that transparently saves connections to our MySQL servers, and reuses them whenever a new connection with the same properties (i.e. username, database) comes in. This reduces connection overhead, and improves overall throughput, without requiring changes to client code.
• Configured a cluster for running massively distributed "big data" analysis jobs

You're a great fit for us if you have:

• expert-level knowledge of C++, including the STL and Boost
• extensive practical experience building infrastructure for large-scale search and content delivery, using Solr, Lucene, Hadoop, Memcached, Thrift, or related technologies
• strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases such as MySQL and HBase; ideally working with very large data stores
• exposure to modern machine learning techniques; including algorithms for classification, regression, topic modelling, and computer vision/image analysis
• a degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field
• 5 years of professional software development experience in agile, team-based environments
• legal authorization to work in Canada
• an appreciation for quality coffee and a desire to hone your barista skills

We enjoy looking at code samples. Please include links to your live projects, github accounts, etc.
 

Salary/Benefits:

Salary and potential stock option packages commensurate with experience.