Platform Staff Engineer - UK

Your Impact

The Staff Software Engineer (Platform) leads large-scale projects and is a key contributor to their group's success. They are involved in long-term strategic planning, mentor senior engineers, and are influential in technical decision-making across multiple teams or a department. They focus on implementation and system design, as well as maintaining and evolving DISCO’s distributed data platform.

What You'll Do

• Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Provides technical leadership in project teams, guiding engineers, and contributing to technical decision-making. Sets technical direction for large projects or teams, driving innovation, and solving organization-wide problems.
• Performance Optimization: Focuses on designing systems for high performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Ownership: Proactively identifies areas of products and systems that currently have problems or will develop problems as well as makes plans to address those problems.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Works with stakeholders, including product managers, designers, developers, and executives, to align architectural designs with business needs and customer expectations.
• Software Development: Designs, develops, and maintains sophisticated, scalable, high-performance data software solutions, ensuring they are efficient, scalable, and meet business
  equirements with architectural excellence for our big data platform at petabyte scale. Responsible for the boundary identification, system design and grooming for one or more sub-systems.
• Code Quality and Optimization: Upholds and enhances code quality through rigorous review processes, optimization techniques, and adherence to best practices.
• Technical Problem Solving: Addresses intricate technical issues through innovative problem-solving strategies.
• Collaboration and Communication: Works effectively within the engineering team and cross-functional teams, collaborating with other engineers, product managers, and stakeholders, contributing to project planning and execution.
• Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Stays updated with the latest technology trends and advancements, continually enhancing skills and knowledge, bringing innovative ideas to the team.
• Technical Documentation: Creates and maintains comprehensive technical documentation, ensuring clarity and accessibility of information.
• Data Platform Development: Builds and maintains scalable and robust data platforms to support analytics, machine learning, and business intelligence.
• Data Integration and ETL: Develops and optimizes ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes and data integration pipelines. Ensures efficient data flow across various sources and systems.
• Advanced File Processing: Develops extensible file processing pipelines that offer flexible, self-service artifact generation. Researches and evaluates file processing software based on fidelity, reliability, and performance criteria. Models file processing outcomes within an observability framework to provide insights for engineering teams and business leaders. Develops engineering systems that facilitate rapid and automatic evaluation of file processors.
• Data Management: Crafts and orchestrates scaleout data pipelines that optimize serverless and containerized compute to balance cost, latency, and duration for big-data solutions. Contributes to algorithmically intensive data engines operating on streaming, large, or multi-tenant datasets. Troubleshoots systems, identify root causes, and rectify bugs.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of relevant experience in backend engineering, with a substantial focus on big data platforms.
• 7+ years of professional experience with each of the following: Service-Oriented Architecture, Docker-based services, microservices, API, and Data Model Design or Implementation.
• Experience with Large-Scale Systems: Involvement in developing, monitoring, and maintaining large-scale, high-availability software systems.
• Experience designing and developing from a Security Perspective.
• Demonstrated experience in leading or playing key roles in significant software projects, showing an ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a team.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing, implementing, and maintaining (through operational observability) high-availability, high-performance, distributed data processing systems.
• Experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers for efficient, language-agnostic service-to-service communication.
• Proven ability to deliver well-crafted, tested, and maintainable code solutions to complex technical challenges.
• Experience with a variety of software stacks including, but not limited to, JVM-focused tech stacks, particularly server-side Kotlin and gRPC.
• Deep expertise with both relational and non-relational data stores: Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
• Experience delivering data platform software solutions (including designing, implementing, and operating) in the cloud.
• Experience selecting and extending 3rd party components (commercial or open source) that provide operational leverage.
• Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and practices.
• Experience using feature or release toggles as a code branching strategy.
• Experience leveraging observability systems (logging, metrics, traces) to monitor and debug production subsystems and generate business-level metrics.
• Experience with algorithmically intensive data engines operating on streaming, large, or multi-tenant datasets.
• Experience with designing, modifying, and operating multi-tenant systems.
• Experience with tools such as Envoy or AWS App Mesh.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools (like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or CircleCI) for automated testing and deployment of microservices.

Even Better If You Have...

• Knowledge of microservices architecture principles, including decentralized data management, service discovery, and bounded contexts. Skilled in microservices technology stack, ability to optimize performance, and ensure security and scalability across the system.
• Skilled in containerization technologies such as Docker and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Experience in creating, deploying, and managing containers.
• Skilled in implementing RESTful APIs for outward-facing services and using gRPC for efficient internal service-to-service communication.
• Ability to build backend systems that can support future UI/UX initiatives and performance requirements.
• Knowledge of system architecture, design patterns, and best practices in software development.
• Skilled at designing and operating software in a Cloud Provider, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Knowledge of both relational and non-relational data stores, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL.
• Skilled at analytical abilities and problem-solving, capable of addressing complex technical challenges.
• Skilled in programming languages and frameworks commonly used in SaaS development. In particular, Java/Kotlin, Python, C#, as well as a deep understanding of software engineering principles.
• Familiarity with server management, network configurations, and an understanding of cloud services (like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud).
• Knowledge of various stages of the SDLC, including design, development, testing, and deployment.
• Knowledge of async message or event based dataflow architectures (Kafka, etc).
• Knowledge of design, implementation, and operation of data-intensive, distributed systems.

Authorization to Work in the U.K.: Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United Kingdom without sponsorship now or in the future. DISCO is not currently sponsoring visas.

Perks of DISCO

• Open, inclusive, and fun environment
• Benefits, including medical and dental insurance
• Competitive salary plus discretionary bonus
• Competitive salary plus RSUs
• Opportunity to be a part of a startup that is revolutionizing the legal industry
• Growth opportunities throughout the company

About DISCO

DISCO provides a cloud-native, artificial intelligence-powered legal solution that simplifies ediscovery, legal document review and case management for enterprises, law firms, legal services providers and governments. Our scalable, integrated solution enables legal departments to easily collect, process and review enterprise data that is relevant or potentially relevant to legal matters.

At DISCO, we believe AI is a core enabler of how work gets done. All employees are expected to proactively adopt and responsibly use AI tools to drive efficiency, improve outcomes, and continuously evolve how they operate in their role.

Are you ready to help us fulfill our mission to use technology to strengthen the rule of law? Join us!

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.