Company Overview

Graphika empowers the world to understand and navigate the Cybersocial Terrain. We create large-scale, in-depth maps of social media landscapes and conversations to discover how communities form online and how influence and information flow within large scale networks. Our interdisciplinary team uses our unique, patented set of technologies and tools to create and apply new, rigorous analytical methods to answer difficult questions about online conversations.

About the Role

Graphika seeks an experienced Backend engineer to join our technology team. The technology team at Graphika builds the platform driving our cutting-edge analysis. We work with large scale graph algorithms and streaming data to tackle interesting questions in new ways. 
The backend engineer will be a generalist who collaborates with various other members of the team (including other backend engineers, frontend engineers and product team) to help plan and implement solutions to fix business problems. The backend engineer will also contribute to building and scaling our various data pipelines, working closely with our data science and analysis teams. This is a full-time role.

Areas of Responsibility

• Be a generalist with an eye for intra-system and inter-system communication
• Actively design, develop and support features and/or systems which serve diverse use cases across Product, Tech, and Labs teams
• Write and maintain Python and/or Ruby code, specifically APIs
• Consistently test code and systems for robustness

Ideal Candidate Profile

You have made significant and self-directed contributions to collaborative software projects, from design through implementation. You are a software generalist, comfortable with picking up new technologies and projects. You have a working knowledge of CS fundamentals like algorithms, data structures, and time complexity.
You can see the forest for the trees. You think beyond the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing. You can maintain a focus on shipping software products, understanding that done is often preferable to perfect.Y
You are an enthusiastic teammate, who engages in collaboration and proactive discussion. You are an effective communicator who can explain technical concepts to product leaders, customer support, and other engineers. You work with confidence and without ego. You have deep knowledge and exercise a high degree of ownership in your daily work. You have loosely-held, defensible ideas, and advocate for what you believe is right. You can surface your unarticulated assumptions. You are also adept at identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and quick to support your fellow teammates.

QualificationsRequired:

• Professional programming experience in Python
• Understanding of how APIs work (HTTP and related technologies)
• Familiarity with API frameworks such as Django, Flask, or Sinatra
• Experience with cloud computing
• Knowledge of SQL and common relational database systems such as PostgreSQL and MySQL
• Can participate in architecture discussions
• Ability to work legally in the US without visa sponsorship

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with Ruby
• Knowledge of distributed systems architectures
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, specifically)
• In-depth experience with AWS services: S3, Lambda, Kinesis, SQS, etc
• Previous work in a data-focused organization
• Practice implementing workflow-based architectures
• Experience with social media analysis
• knowledge of NoSQL technologies like Redis or Mongo

All Graphika Tech Team Members...

• understand and appreciate good software engineering practices, including version control, code reviews, testing, and refactoring
• are comfortable debugging and optimizing code
• write tests to make sure code is reliable
• help shape technical decisions within the team
• collaborate within and across departments to ensure successful product creation
• have the ability to pick up new tools and technologies as needed

Education Requirements:

Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO, with a company-mandated minimum of ten days of vacation time taken per year.
• 100% healthcare (health, vision, dental) premium coverage for employees; 50% premium coverage for families
• For NYers, access to "Graphikafé," our NYC small office setup with bookable hotdesks, meeting rooms, and phone booths
• Remote personal office setup stipend + 20% of home internet costs covered

An important note about joining Graphika during this extraordinary time:

Graphika is growing! Despite the downturn and accompanying reductions in other sectors and companies, Graphika is retaining current employees and is actively hiring for full time positions. 

In the BeforeTimes, Graphika's Technology Team was fully co-located in our NYC office. On March 12, 2020, Graphika moved to a fully-distributed model, and we've been working together as a company to respond to the changing realities of the AfterTimes. As a result, we are happy to consider applicants who are located in the continental US, with the caveat that the Technology Team works on Eastern time and begins their day at around 10am. Daily Standup is at 10:30am EST.