Backend Software Engineer
Description
FlightAware has built the world’s leading aviation software platform, processing over 180 million incoming messages an hour from over 30,000 feeds—over 150 gigabytes a day and growing—to provide the best, most complete, and most accurate real-time flight tracking services in the industry. We are proud to have built a wide variety of successful products on this foundation that have become central to the aviation industry at large.
Regardless of role, we expect excellent interpersonal and communication skills across all hires at FlightAware. We look for candidates who will thrive here, meaning they demonstrate clear communication, embrace open feedback, trust their colleagues, and are driven to execute, deliver, and complete projects independently and efficiently.
Software engineers at FlightAware build the industry’s leading platform for advanced, accurate, actionable data, and insights that inform every aviation decision. They build the industry’s leading mobile and web apps that serve live flight information to millions of travelers and their families. They design complex distributed systems that process thousands of messages per second. They deploy thousands of machine learning models to production that the world’s largest airlines and airports rely on for operational efficiency. And they create the high-quality tools that the organization needs to explore all the possibilities of FlightAware’s vast and growing aviation datasets and to act on our findings.
As a FlightAware engineer, you’ll be part of a highly collaborative, ambitious, and future-reaching organization. We attract engineers with a passion for aviation and data. Our team champions intellectual curiosity, openness, and industry-leading technical innovation. We invest in building excellent internal tooling and engineering support in order to create a productive and highly effective team that anticipates the future and leads by example. You’ll get to learn alongside talented senior engineers and share your own expertise.
You will be interviewed for a general engineering role and matched to a team towards the end of the process or before starting.
This is a full-time role. Our team is headquartered in Houston, Texas, but we work as a distributed team and accept remote applicants.
Requirements
- A bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or another technical field (or you’re graduating soon).
- Excellent interpersonal skills, both written and verbal.
- An obsession with writing elegant, high-quality, well-tested code.
- Experience with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, C++, Haskell, Scala, Elm, or similar.
- Knowledge of and interest in large-scale systems.
Nice to have:
- Strong interest in and deep knowledge of programming languages, including functional languages.
- Passionate about general developer tooling and productivity.
- You are a private pilot or you are looking to pursue your private pilot license.
- Very strong practical knowledge of Linux and the command line.
Responsibilities
Depending on the team you join, you might do any of the following:
- Build and optimize the systems that serve our flight data APIs to customers in industry.
- Dig deep into our data fusion and interpretation algorithms to improve matching and information synthesis of live position and flightplan feeds.
- Scale the architecture of the company’s core flight tracking systems.
- Build high-quality internal tooling for supporting massive regression test suites and simulated replays of core infrastructure.
- Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines to support data and analytical needs.
- Drive technical innovation that helps make all of our engineers and teams more effective by automating builds, tests, deployments, dependency management, and more.
- Design state-of-the-art machine learning models that compute estimated runway landing and gate arrival times.
- Work directly with customers in industry to understand how our systems can better serve them.
- Improve our data ingestion platform that onboards critical live aviation data from data feeds across the world.
- Create highly reliable distributed model serving infrastructure across multiple data centers.
- Optimize our map serving infrastructure that sends millions of positions to maps per second.
Education
- A bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or software engineering, or equivalent experience.