Software Engineer, Core Applications

Engineering / Remote (Pacific Time Zone)

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Flipboard is a content discovery platform for your passions, interests, and news. Available on web, iOS, and Android, Flipboard offers the world important and influential articles shared by the greatest publishers and our awesome Flipboard community to advance conversation, keep people informed, and inspire them to engage, learn, and lead.

The team is based at Flipboard Headquarters in Redwood City, California and working remotely during the pandemic. We have a flexible work from home policy and prefer engineers to work a few days a week from the office post pandemic.

At Flipboard we are re-imagining how people consume news and information in the world. The Core Applications team helps users find and share the stories and videos that inform and inspire them. It also empowers publishers to connect with the audiences that love their content.

Responsibilities of a Core Applications Software Engineer
As a software engineer on the Core Applications team, you will work with an interdisciplinary group of engineers, product managers, community support leaders, designers and editorial staff to scale and develop our suite of microservices that power the main functionality of the Flipboard app. 

The Core Apps team is highly collaborative, but engineers at Flipboard also have substantial independence and responsibility over the systems their teams maintain. You will participate in feature development, architecture and infrastructure design, log analysis, server debugging, testing implementation, mentorship, and technical documentation. The systems you build will scale to millions of daily active users. You will have the opportunity to contribute to our codebase and production services from Day One. 

Here are some examples of what the Core Apps team works on:

  • We build and format personalized feeds from a variety of sources and user signals while balancing efficiency and scalability of the feed-building process
  • We support and expand on a JVM-based distributed microservices architecture that powers millions of mobile, web, and syndicated clients
  • We build social functionality, including likes, follows, comments, notifications, and more within the application
  • We design and implement features to support curation — our APIs power the magazine, storyboard, and video experience that users love
  • We build internal tooling to help our editorial and community support teams better understand and delight our users
  • We interface with third-party social and content APIs to expand sources which we use to build better feeds
  • We proactively identify avenues for spam and abuse within our systems and address them
  • We participate in the product design process, taking into account usage data, user requests, and industry trends in order to ship and measure the impact of quality features and experience improvements

Preferred Skills & Experience

  • Minimum 3 years of relevant industry experience
  • Java or another JVM language (Scala, Clojure) and Python
  • Large-scale distributed architecture and implementation
  • SQL and noSQL databases
  • Self-starter with excellent communication skills
  • Enjoys working on open-ended problems without clearly defined solutions
  • Interest in the publishing or advertising industries
  • Bonus: experience with Amazon Web Services, in particular RDS, S3, Redshift, EC2, Cloudfront, EMR
  • Bonus: Experience with Golang or Ruby
  • Bonus: Experience with Apache HBase

Benefits & Perks

  • USA: Our benefits include vision, dental, life, and health insurance, plus 401K with an employer match
  • Canada: Our benefits include vision, dental, life, health insurance, “Employee and Family Assistance Program”, plus eligibility to participate in our pension plan with an employer match
  • All Locations: Flexible hours and generous ‘out of office time’ for holidays, vacations, sick leave, relaxation & wellness, personal and family needs | Team celebrations: company anniversaries, birthdays, Thanksgiving, weddings/babies –– you name it, we celebrate it!

Why Join Flipboard?

  • Our vision: At a time when society could really benefit from being more informed and inspired, we are enabling great stories to reach the right communities around the world.
  • Our team: Led by experienced CEO, Mike McCue, the Flipboard team is a positive, respectful, and diverse group of bright and highly capable people who work collaboratively with strong purpose and vision. The Flipboard team is headquartered in downtown Redwood City, CA in the beautiful SF Bay Area. Although our roots lie in the Silicon Valley, our team extends around the world: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, and London.
  • Our culture: We value an environment and culture that encourages people’s voices and perspectives to be heard. We believe that leveraging our team will lead us to create better products and services for all our users and partners. We value diversity and inclusion at Flipboard and are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
  • Our value: We are fully funded and making steady, meaningful progress on a premium, high margin business within a $600B, highly strategic market. Our business model is tightly aligned with our values, our partners and our user experience which makes our company both valuable and unique.
  • Our product: Millions of people truly love Flipboard and rely on it regularly. Flipboard is a standard bearer for great mobile design, innovation, and we deeply value craftsmanship.
  • Our platform: Our platform selects the best content from thousands of publishers around the world, organizes it into highly personalized feeds, and presents it for further curation by the community. We are driven by hard technical challenges and we value pioneering new technology to continually increase the power, efficiency and scale of our platform.

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