Senior Backend Engineer (Remote Global)

Background

Narrative has been building a data collaboration platform designed for simplicity and ease of use since being founded in 2016.

Our primary strength is functioning as a data marketplace where we differentiate ourselves by:

Automatically standardizing data, simplifying the user experience by eliminating the need to deal with n representations of the same underlying concept from different suppliers.
Making platform data accessible through the Narrative Query Language (NQL) and easy-to-use UIs powered by NQL. This enables users to transform, deduplicate, and filter data instead of selecting from a set of provider-defined, pre-packaged datasets.
Giving data providers the ability to define row-level access and pricing policies for their data.
Making it easy to deliver data to a variety of destinations using our "Connector Framework".

We operate two flavours of our platform:

An AWS-based implementation where all operations run on infrastructure we own. Users ingest data into the platform, where it is then available to be used in queries and other collaboration use cases.
A Snowflake-based version where all data-accessing operations (e.g. queries) run inside the user's Snowflake account, deployed using the Snowflake Native App Framework.

Building on the success of our Snowflake model, we're generalizing our platform's architecture to support running all data-accessing operations inside customer-owned environments in on AWS, GCP, and beyond.

Our Connector Framework has also matured into a key differentiator: customers leverage Narrative as a CDP-like enrichment layer, blending first-party data with third-party sources and delivering results into destinations of their choosing (e.g., ad platforms, warehouses).

What You Will Do

You'll evolve the core systems that power our platform, including helping us rearchitect our systems to deliver on our vision of running our query engine on customer infrastructure and improving our Connector Framework so that customers can collaborate with data wherever it lives.

Example Projects

Architect service interfaces and composable subsystems as we work towards making it possible for users to run Narrative's query engine on customer-owned infrastructure.
Improve our job system with more efficient scheduling and resource utilization, support for long-running workflows, and more robust error handling.
Build out additional connectors and improve our "Connector Framework" to make it effortless to get data into and out of our platform while driving down the cost of building and maintaining support for new destinations.
Design a framework to enable efficient cross-data plane data delivery (i.e. enable sending data between separate Narrative app installations and, eventually, the federation of query execution).
Add capabilities to our AI training framework, where users can use platform data to train models then use them in queries or in their customizable entity resolution rules as part of our "Composable Identity" solution.
Improve our data classification engine to make it easier for users to collaborate using any kind of data in the platform.
Improve the monitoring and reliability of our systems with an ever-increasing amount of data being handled: currently we're ingesting > 20 TB into the platform every day.

Technical Stack

In brief, the technologies we use are:

Backend: Scala, Spark, Apache Iceberg, Apache Calcite, Cats, Cats-Effect, Http4s, FS2, Doobie, Deequ, Axolotl, BentoML, and HuggingFace Transformers.
Frontend: Typescript, VueJS, Nuxt, Vite, and Cloudflare Pages.
Operations: AWS (ECR, ECS, EMR, RDS, S3, etc.), Datadog, Docker, Terraform, with some burgeoning use of EKS/Kubernetes.

Ideal Candidate

We are not looking for a 100% fit on all the technology buzzwords, but we are looking for someone with strong personal and technical skills that is eager to pick up new technologies as necessary.

The ideal candidate should:

Have experience in a typed functional language such as Scala, F#, or Haskell, or significant experience in their non-functional equivalents (Java, C#) with an interest in Scala and Functional Programming.
Have experience working with non-trivial quantities of data. Prior experience with Spark would be ideal, but experience with any distributed query engine (Trino, Dremio, etc.) would also be helpful.
Have experience operating in a cloud environment like Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, or similar. Experience deploying and monitoring large data processing systems using e.g. Kubernetes would be a big plus.

Have the ability to drive success in a flat organization with minimal process, including leading the creation of architectural and design documents and interfacing with technical and non-technical team members as necessary.
Ideally, live/work within +/- 3 hours of Eastern Standard Time (EST). At a minimum, be able to commit to having 4 working hours of overlap with a standard EST 9-5 work day.

The Team

We are a small, remote-first team looking for great developers who want to jump in and take major systems and user-facing features from design to launch.

Read more about the team, our culture, and a day in the life of a developer

Our Mission

Narrative is the world’s leading data collaboration platform that enables organizations to supercharge their data strategy with one powerful, cost-effective suite of tools that anyone can use.

Unlike other data solutions, Narrative's data collaboration platform is focused on fundamental principles of autonomy, privacy & compliance, data quality, liquidity, and transparency that make collaboration easier, safer, and more strategic.

Read more about our mission and check our website.

Apply Now

Read more about the hiring process and apply by sending an email to hiring-dev@narrative.io.

If you would like to have a chat to learn more about the company, our culture, or the team before formally applying, just drop us a line at the aforementioned email address.