Staff Backend Engineer

Job Description

As a Staff Backend Engineer focused on observability solutions, you will be leading and designing improvements in observability into products used every day by our customers around the world. You will architect and implement tools relied upon by all internal engineering teams and customer-facing functions at Medidata. Quality and standards matter to us - as a technical leader you will positively influence the Technology organization through close collaboration with other teams and by contributing to shared projects. Our mission is to improve Medidata’s velocity of innovation so we can help our customers power smarter treatments and healthier people. 

Staff Backend Engineer: observability role at Medidata is focused on improving the reliability of our Platform. Your role would be to become the leading engineer in the Japan SRE observability team. This team works to create solutions for Medidata globally. The team is in charge of setting standards and best practices, providing solutions and guidance for the rest of the Medidata teams. As a staff engineer, you will get ownership of solutions to improve the observability and reliability of deployments, communications between services, observability, and alerting. Your solutions will be used by a big engineering organization, you will guide teams and become the subject matter expert they will access to get help. You will interact with a multitude of technical stacks and guide teams on their road to better reliability and insights. We appreciate different areas of expertise and offer growth in the area of focus most suitable to the candidate and our team. 

Responsibilities

• All practitioners have common expectations - listed below - to help us lower MTTR and CFR and accelerate our teams.
• Collaborates on the strategic vision for the team, creating the goals for the team and demonstrating the value of the work of the team
• Proposes and leads new initiatives that are widely applicable within the organization
• Designs and implements company-wide software solutions for complex needs. For instance, a metrics backend for timely access to main vitals and trends of all our services
• Improves the architecture of the services created by your team and ensures their reliability and performance improve
• Guides teams on their observability and alerting needs. Reviews and approves their changes
• Improves implementation of the telemetry solutions, including collaboration with open-source projects
• Understands the runtime environment of services, and guides teams on how to add telemetry for each use case
• Leads hazards reviews with teams and proposes solutions to improve the reliability of services
• Creates solutions to do complex analysis of telemetry data
• Analyzes and implements new auto-scaling mechanisms
• Proposes architectural changes to improve the observability, performance of interactions among multiple services
• Leads RCA meetings and other analyses of past incidents to implement improvement to prevent incidents from repeating
• Creates means to ensure teams review their runtime SLOs and alerts periodically
• Leads writing stories in collaboration with other team members
• Lead improvements of CD for the team. Teaches other members of the team best practices
• Maintains awareness of industry trends and tools, learning and disseminating new practices
• Works with empathy for other teams. Proactively worries about other teams
• Proactively contributes to internal technical documentation content and organization
• Provides leadership throughout planning, design, implementation, deployment, maintenance, and monitoring
• Designs complex solutions writes code PR reviews and sets direction company-wide through technical knowledge
• Debugs the most complex issues and sets mechanisms and best practices to avoid them in the future
• Collaborate with senior leadership to support strategic initiatives
• Mentors and trains other team members
• Owns relationships with other teams and focuses on maximizing the impact of the team in the organization
• Leads Continue Delivery pipeline changes and improvements
• Improves deployment safety (blue/green, CD automation) and automation

Qualifications

Your Competencies

• Leads the team to drive conclusions and actions
• Becomes a known Subject Matter Expert for multiple teams within the organization
• Communicates effectively with various cross-functional teams and clients
• Fluent level English required. No Japanese required

Your Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in computer science (or related field) or equivalent experience
• Experience creating innovative monitoring tools
• Experience with web backend, synchronous and asynchronous communications
• Experience consuming, designing, and building APIs
• Experience with Opentelemetry, traces, metrics and log processing
• Experience with Grafana solutions
• Experience with Kubernetes and AWS services
• 3+ years of experience with various programming languages (Go, Ruby, C#, Java, Rust preferred)
• Experience building observability backends preferred

About the Company 

Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, is leading the digital transformation of life sciences, creating hope for millions of people. Medidata helps generate the evidence and insights to help pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device and diagnostics companies, and academic researchers accelerate value, minimize risk, and optimize outcomes. More than one million registered users across 2,000+ customers and partners access the world's most trusted platform for clinical development, commercial, and real-world data. Known for its ground-breaking technological innovations, Medidata has supported more than 30,000 clinical trials and 9 million study participants. And Medidata’s ongoing commitment to infusing the patient voice into trial designs and solutions is helping to create a better and more inclusive experience for all participants in clinical studies. Medidata is involved in nearly 40% of company-initiated trial starts globally, with studies conducted in more than 140 countries. More than 70% of novel drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022 were developed with Medidata software. Medidata is headquartered in New York City and has offices around the world to meet the needs of its customers. Discover more at www.medidata.com and follow us @medidata.

Equal Employment Opportunity

In order to provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals, employment decisions at Medidata are based on merit, qualifications and abilities. Medidata is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or medical or common conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, familial status, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, veteran status, military service, application for military service, genetic information, receipt of free medical care, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Medidata will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities, in accordance with applicable law.