London, United Kingdom

Permutive is looking for a software engineer to develop our edge-compute capabilities.

We would be excited to hear from experienced software engineers who are mathematically minded in their approach and have some commercial experience with embedded SDKs.

You will be working on our query language, which sits at the core of our platform and distributes computation to over a billion devices each month. Written in Haskell, this language currently supports segmentation, analytics, and model inference for users across the web.

This role is perfect for someone excited by contributing to a new computing paradigm through the lens of real-world business problems, who strives for perfection but also knows when to compromise and prioritise for the greater good of the team. There are numerous technical yet practical challenges to tackle, and there are novel questions that come with building a massively geo-distributed system which need answering.

Some problems you will help solve in this role are...

How do we handle distributed compute and storage at a massive scale?
How can we collect, aggregate, and query data across billions of devices while respecting user privacy?
How can we balance edge and cloud processing to optimize for the performance metrics that benefit our end-users?
How can we safely migrate our target language from JavaScript to WebAssembly, bearing in mind we would become one of the largest WebAssembly deployments on the Internet?
How can we seamlessly deploy changes to millions/billions of users and confidently revert back if needed?
How can we perform rigorous testing and simulations of our query language to ensure correctness and performance?
How can we measure edge compute metrics in production?

The wider context

Permutive is a B2B SaaS company building the data platform and tools for a world with a trillion edge devices. We have product–market fit and customers that love us, and we’re 90+ people and growing rapidly in Europe and the US. We have received funding from some of the world’s best investors, including Y Combinator.

We’re 25+ engineers working to build an outstanding engineering culture so that everyone who joins has the opportunity and the support to do the best work of their life. Small, autonomous teams are important to us, and we want to empower everyone to make—and be accountable for—decisions through ownership.

Everything we build has to scale: our platform handles more requests each day than there are new tweets and Google searches, and each month we see more than a billion users. We think applying functional programming techniques like compositionality and type-safety is the best way to build the type of massive distributed system our platform comprises, allowing us to move fast without sacrificing quality.

The ideal person will have...

Strong commercial awareness with a bias towards delivery
Experience and/or hobby projects in Haskell, or a keen interest in learning it
Experience with generic, strongly-typed programming
Experience with JavaScript and knowledge of its performance characteristics on different JavaScript engines
Knowledge of distributed systems
Some experience of low-level programming
An interest in WebAssembly or LLVM

It is a bonus if you have any of the below

Experience processing data from high-volume sources (e.g. IoT, telecommunications, autonomous cars)
Experience working with WebAssembly or LLVM
Interest or experience in being a voice for our work in the wider tech community (e.g. open source work, meetups, conferences, articles)
A mathematical background or interest in using mathematics (particularly abstract algebra) as a rigorous foundation for encoding properties of distributed systems

How we pay

For a typical candidate with some commercial experience, plus most of our requirements we would likely pay £100,000 + options.

For a candidate with a breadth of experience, and who meets several of our bonus criteria, we'd pay up to £130,000 + options.

Benefits:

Stock options (you'll own a piece of the pie)
Parental Leave Policy entitling new parents up to 26 weeks of leave on full pay
Everyone has an annual learning budget of £2,400 which we encourage you to use to level up
Time to rest and relax with unlimited paid leave (minimum expectation of 25 days annually)
Extensive training and development opportunities
Automatic enrolment into our pension scheme from day one
Free access to Spill, our mental health partners

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
At Permutive, we’re taking a thoughtful, intersectional, long-term approach to diversity, equity & inclusion. We care deeply about creating an inclusive work environment that allows everyone to flourish, and we are taking continual action to progress in that direction. If you would like to read an outline of efforts we have already made towards becoming a more inclusive company as well as insight into what we are actively working on, you can find that information here.

How we are responding to COVID-19
We have a presence in London and New York. At the beginning of March 2020 we made the decision to move to working from home for all Permutive employees until 2022. We have invested significant time and budget into ensuring that everyone is suitably equipped to manage this time period. Our guiding principle behind any decision we make will always be the health and well-being of our employees.

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Permutive is hiring a

Query Language Engineer

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