Narrativ is a subscription technology platform for brands to acquire new customers through trust-based marketing. We built an ad-free alternative to the e-commerce growth marketing playbook by building the commerce and payments infrastructure for the creator economy.

Brands know consumers are tired of being inundated with ads that only tell one side of the story - yet the marketing playbook hasn’t evolved. Unlike search engine marketing or social marketing, trust-based marketing is honest and unbiased, balanced with both pros and cons, and comes from diverse voices that speak with integrity and specificity. Creators are at the center of consumer trust today.

Narrativ’s technology gives all brands and creators - not just the top 1% - the tools to win in the $50 billion creator economy by building trust with consumers, not selling ads. We’ve been recognized as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and one of Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Companies alongside giants like Google, Microsoft, and Slack. 

Do you share our vision for decentralizing the institutions that control the Internet today? Come join our team.

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Why you should work here:

• We’re growing fast, without constantly diluting your equity: Narrativ is growing 3-4X year over year (yep, you read that right). Hundreds of brands joined Narrativ’s platform in the last year, from enterprises like Best Buy, Sephora, and Samsung, to rising brands like Yeti, Cariuma, and Peace Out Skincare.
  
• Massive TAM, unique approach:  We’re tackling the creator economy and e-commerce, a $50-150 billion market. Narrativ’s unique approach is that we believe technology is not neutral – its values are encoded by its creators. We value integrity, specificity, and diversity (not just scale at all costs).
  
• Join a strong, diverse team: We’re more than doubling in size and growing to a team of 130 by the end of the year. Narrativ is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – more than 50% of our leadership team are women. We’ve taken the 15% pledge both in our talent strategy and across creators on our platform.  We’re amplifying our diverse team’s support of communities of color by matching 200% of all individual donations as a company.
  

Last, but very important, we are a startup: We’re looking for people who aren’t afraid to wield the chaos that comes with true creation, explore ambiguity, set the bar for excellence, and have full ownership over their impact. You’ll never be a cog in a machine here, but you won’t have the established blueprints of being one either. If all this sounds exciting to you, come join us.

The Job:

A staff backend engineer at Narrativ will lead the design and implementation of a first-class data platform. You understand the history of batch and streaming big data systems, know when awk outperforms Hadoop map-reduce, and have spent a lot of time thinking about the best ways to handle schema drift. You care deeply about making scalable systems from simple, reliable, and correct building blocks. You can explain the advantages and disadvantages of a wide range of data structures depending on the desired use case. You can articulate when a general solution is good enough, and when a specialized solution is necessary.

You are Narrativ’s Staff Backend Engineer 💽

Mission

• Lead data architecture efforts at Narrativ, from prototype to test to build
• Enable scalability and observability for batch and realtime data streams
• Drive adoption of best practices through mentorship and by example
• Make it simple for the business to find and use data to make decisions

Key Results

• Merchant product feed can ingest datasets of 10M+
• Create a system that captures state changes in Narrativ’s Product Graph and supporting workflows for equality control and analysis purposes.
• Consolidate data architecture into key components (e.g. one streaming system instead of two, one system event bus instead of lossy point-to-point communication)
• Use data schemas well..proper typing, schema registry, handle schema drift, validation
• Create performant straightforward patterns for OLTP, OLAP, streaming ingest and enrichment, creating search indexes, etc

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience with big data systems such as Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Storm, Heron, NiFi, Hive, etc
• Understanding of different serialization and storage formats like Avro, Parquet, Thrift, Protocol Buffers, FlatBuffers, JSON, CSV, XML
• Working knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), non-relational (Redis, Cassandra/Scylla), and warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery)
• Experience with streaming data technologies and patterns
• Experience with orchestration frameworks like Airflow, Oozie
• Expertise in a general purpose programming language
• Strong experience in SQL
• Proven experience leading successful data platform work in multi-team scenarios.

Bonus

• Expertise in Scala, Java, or Kotlin
• Experience in Elixir/Erling
• Working knowledge of probabilistic data structures and algorithms like count-min sketch, hyperloglog, bloom filters, reservoir sampling, etc