Senior Software Engineer - Backend Developer Experience

Thales of Miletus was an ancient pre-socratic philosopher, and one of the “seven sages”, or the founders of ancient greece. Many regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, breaking from the prior use of mythology to explain the world and instead using natural philosophy.

According to legend (and Aristotle), Thales was challenged by his fellow citizens as to what use his mathematics and natural philosophy was: if his ideas were so powerful, why was he still poor? Surely there had to be some practical use to his theories? 

In response to this, Thales purchased the option to rent all of the olive presses during the next harvest season: based on his astronomical observations of the previous years he accurately predicted that it would be a bumper olive crop. He then became immensely rich during the harvest, when he had an effective monopoly on olive presses, and could set his own prices.

On the Developer User Experience team at Mercury we use a blend of theory and practice to help developers profit. We endeavor to always be looking ahead, at the second order considerations of our growth, and to make smart decisions today that set us up for success tomorrow. Mercury is hiring an experienced Sr. Software engineer to help us create paved paths for the rest of the 150+ engineers.

As a Sr. Software Engineer on Backend DUX, you'll work on a team of incredibly talented engineers in creating a developer ecosystem which delivers speed, quality, and delight for Mercury's engineers. Mercury's primary backend language is Haskell, and your team is composed of industry recognized thought leaders in that community. You'll work alongside other enablement teams whose overarching mission is to achieve startup-like developer effectiveness at scale.

As part of this role, you and your team will:

• Instrument the software development life cycle, ensuring we have effective quantitative and qualitative ways of understanding our engineers’ speed, quality, and enjoyment of their work.
• Use a product-centric approach to improving the effectiveness of our backend engineers through the introduction of novel tools and methodologies.
• Create patches for, and contribute upstream to popular open source projects, such as GHC, GHCi, Persistent, and Nixpkgs
• Create novel solutions and tooling to keep developers in the world’s largest Haskell codebase productive as we scale, often open sourcing these tools where possible
• Embed …