Staff Backend Performance Engineer

Who we are

Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform that helps developers build applications quickly, usually within hours.

Since its inception, Appsmith has gained significant traction, with over 10 million downloads, more than 30,000 stars on GitHub, and adoption by 10,000+ organisations across 150 countries.

Our team is focussed on ensuring performance of the product that delights the users and makes them want to use Appsmith for every app they build again and again. Performance of appsmith should be a differentiating factor from its competitors. The performance perceived by the end user directly correlates to their impression of the quality of the product. A faster product would have higher retention and more complex use cases implemented on it by the customer.

The goal of the team is to iteratively identify and ship projects that improve the performance of appsmith and help it support 10x of the current traffic in the future.

How we work

1. Our project work is focused around identifying critical pieces of systems in our stack that are not performant and shipping architecture changes that addresses those bottlenecks and ensure that those changes would support 10x of the current traffic.
2. We are a remote first company. All communication is done async. There are no online timings. The culture assumes that everyone in Appsmith takes responsibility for the execution and quality of their work.
3. Documentation of projects and work is an essential culture we follow to effectively communicate in a remote setup and help maintain an async work environment.

What you will do

• You will be joining an agile and fully remote team as a staff backend developer. To us, this means your role extends beyond ownership of your day to day work; we expect you to embrace the broader picture — product vision, system architecture, and team collaboration.
• Performance team is a challenging role to work in since we have to optimize code that we may not have necessarily authored. Reaching out to other teams responsible for that piece of code and collaborating with them is a frequent and an essential part of the role.
• Navigate many independent sub systems of Appsmith on your own and gain understanding of the system architecture to identify the flow of data.
• Proactively identify prod performance issues with these sub systems, add missing observability and draft roadmaps to solve those issues.
• Architect and implement solutions, ensure sufficient documentation and test coverage, manage your time and proactively communicate your progress and decisions.
• Lead the project progress and decision making independently to meet the success criteria of the projects within the defined timelines.
• Stay motivated and course correct frequently without losing focus of north star metrics along with quality.

Qualifications

1. Strong backend technical skills in Spring Webflux, Postgres, MongoDB. Preferable experience of 7-8 years.
2. Strong devops skill (for example in cloud solutions like AWS) with demonstrated experience in setting up new micro services.
3. Knowledge of adding observability to complex systems using OpenTelemetry i.e Traces, Logs and Metrics. Experience working with Observability platforms like New Relic or Grafana.
4. Ability to collaborate with customers, cross functional backend, frontend and product teams to triage prod issues and come up with a clear RCA and a plan of action to fix the issue.
5. Read and assimilate performance profiles from frontend and backend and identify solutions for the latencies identified in the profiles.
6. Define north star metric and execute long term roadmap for defining performance as the distinguishing factor for Appsmith from its competitors.
7. Comprehend multi micro-service based complex systems on their own and iteratively improve the system performance sprint by sprint measured with absolute observability data.
8. Can work in highly dynamic environment as a self motivated, self initiated and independent individual contributor delivering maximum impact for the product and its customers.
9. Mentor a team of developers in the team to execute their and team projects.

Application Process

Interview with a hiring manager

In a conversation with a hiring manager we'll discuss your prior work experience and your career aspirations, ensuring it aligns with our expectations for the role. Feel free to ask questions about the team, company, and product.

Prepare by researching Appsmith, focusing on our product. Hint: check out our GitHub repo for insights.

Technical assessment - 1

A technical assessment will gauge your knowledge on algorithms. You will be expected to solve one or two algorithms question during the interview on an online editor and come up with a solution. An ideal candidate would propose different approaches, explaining complexity of each approach and scalability of the solution. You would need to come up with test cases that ensure the correctness of the proposed algorithm.

Prior to the assessment, refresh your memory on various data structures and algorithms.

Technical assessment - 2

A technical assessment will gauge your knowledge of our tech stack (Spring Webflux, MongoDB, Java, AWS). Be prepared to demonstrate your approach to problem-solving during the interview. You're welcome to inquire about our quality standards, refactoring practices, estimation process, and CI/CD.

Prior to the assessment, refresh your memory on fundamentals of Java, multithreading, web servers and databases. Share 1-2 interesting solutions from your past experiences.

System design assessment

The system design assessment will focus on your experience in software architecture and balancing scalability with versatility and speed of delivery. Expect being offered a relevant problem to discuss with an interviewer. Feel free to ask about our approach to tech and system design, tech strategy, and Appsmith's conventions and practices.

In preparation, reflect on 1-2 compelling system design cases from your past.

Executive round

In the final round, meet with one of Appsmith's executive co-founders. This is a culture fit discussion, and you're encouraged to ask questions about our culture, mission, and strategy. It's a chance to understand the broader vision of Appsmith.

Benefits

• Unlimited leave policy
• Medical insurance
• Maternal / Paternal leaves
• Fully remote and distributed team
• Flexible work hours
• Experienced Cross Demographic team