Senior Backend Engineer (Python)

Hi there

We’re SmileDirectClub, and we’re big believers that everyone should have access to a smile they love. We also believe that you deserve a job you’ll love. At SmileDirectClub, you’ll help people change their lives – and in doing so, change your own.

We believe it takes someone special to make a difference, and that what we do positively affects the way people see and share themselves. There’s a reward in knowing you’re bringing about change for the better, and that your personal experience helps you create the best experience for others. That’s why we value our Team Members as much as our Club Members. We believe there’s a piece of us in every smile we make. And that great companies are built person by person.

About the role

This is a unique opportunity to join our highly autonomous, self-organizing, cross-functional AI team to shape the future of high-tech, direct-to-consumer telehealth.

As a key member of our small, tightly-knit team, you will have lots of ownership and impact on the backend products and concepts we’re building, and use the latest technologies to help us tackle tough design, product, and technological problems.

Although ultimately we’re working towards end-user products, this position would entail extensive experimentation and prototyping aimed at system experiences of the future, and you will be working very closely with a few other software engineers, designers, and ML scientists on our team to iterate quickly and ship early and often.

As a team, we value empathy, curiosity, candor, diversity of thought, helping each other, building on top of each others’ work, and psychological safety that allows us to bring our best, whole selves to work.

We're looking for creative, out-of-the-box thinkers who love their craft, question the status quo, go out of their way to help a colleague, speak up when they see a problem, and believe the only dumb question is the one not asked. Bonus points are if you’re interested not only in building cool products but also in the mechanics of highly functioning teams.

Responsibilities

• Enjoy what you work on and how you work on it, and care that people on your team feel the same way. We believe that this is the best way to achieve great results for everybody.
• Lead promoter of software engineering best practices. Working with ML engineers to improve best practices and build fast, reliable, and maintainable code. Help ensure that all on our team can do their best work.
• Work with our interdisciplinary team to build end-to-end prototypes to prove out the more ambitious visions.
• Architect and build cloud infrastructure to efficiently and cost-effectively run various Python and TypeScript micro-services.
• Develop backend services as needed to create fully functioning prototypes
• The items here might be as different as choosing a technology to run computation (e.g lambda vs batch), choosing proper instance type for a workload, hacking third-party libraries to support custom data types, writing a BFF for a customer facing mobile app or handling some business event from another bounded context.
• Collaborate with other teams across the company to productize successful prototypes and POCs.

Our Tech Stack

• Python
• AWS (Batch, Lambda, S3, EventBridge, etc...)
• Docker
• Terraform
• Typescript
• Github Actions

It will really make us smile if you have...

• Strong experience in server-side programming languages (Python strongly preferred)
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• Good understanding of databases (SQL, NoSQL, etc.) and experience with database management and optimization.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms (AWS strongly preferred) and infrastructure as code.
• Strong knowledge of web technologies (HTTP, REST, etc.) and experience with building and integrating RESTful APIs.
• Experience with micro-services architecture and building scalable, highly available systems.
• Good understanding of security principles and experience with securing applications and data.
• Knowledge of DevOps practices such as continuous integration and deployment, containerization, and monitoring.
• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, ability to work with cross-functional teams.

... and we’ll give you extra points for...

• Terraform CDK
• TypeScript knowledge
• Some knowledge of Machine Learning

If you don’t feel like you satisfy all of the above, but are excited about this opportunity, we highly encourage you to apply!

Benefits of joining the club

Whether it’s financial well-being, balancing parenting and work, or stress management, we’ll provide you the support you need to do your best work yet. Our first-class compensation package includes a competitive salary and options offering, a 401K match, medical, dental and vision insurance, flexible working hours, paid parental leave, unlimited time off, tuition reimbursement, aligner and whitening treatment discount, and a lot more!