Senior Software Engineer - Orchestration & Job Execution

Alteryx•Irvine, CA

About The Position

Alteryx is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our cloud platform engineering team. In this role, you will help design, build, operate, and evolve backend services that coordinate how work moves through Alteryx Cloud. You will work on platform capabilities related to orchestration, job execution, workflow runtime services, and reliable service-to-service coordination. This is a senior engineering role for someone comfortable owning complex production systems end to end. You should be able to reason about distributed systems, asynchronous processing, reliability, observability, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs. You will partner with platform, product, security, QE, and application teams to make cloud platform capabilities reliable, understandable, and safe to operate at scale. The role is backend-heavy and involves building APIs, services, workers, libraries, and runtime infrastructure. You will work with modern cloud-native systems and technologies such as TypeScript/Node.js, relational databases, messaging or queueing systems, event-driven architecture, containers, Kubernetes, and observability tooling.

Requirements

5+ years preferred (4+ years minimum) of professional software development experience, with meaningful ownership of production backend services, cloud platform capabilities, or distributed systems.
Strong experience building backend services using TypeScript/Node.js, or core systems languages like Go, Java, or Rust (with a willingness to code primarily in Node.js)
Experience designing and operating asynchronous, queue-driven, or event-driven systems, including patterns such as retries, cancellation, idempotency, concurrency, ordering, timeouts, and failure handling.
Experience working with durable persistence, service contracts, RESTful APIs, and integrations across multiple services or platform components.
Experience with production systems including containers, Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms, service health, scaling behavior, and operational debugging.
Strong production engineering ownership, including testing, observability, structured logging, metrics, tracing, incident response, and continuous reliability improvement.
Ability to lead design discussions, communicate technical tradeoffs clearly, mentor other engineers, and drive cross-team work through ambiguity with an ownership-oriented mindset.
3+ years of Python and C++ design, development, and debugging experience preferably leveraging open source and open standards
Design, implement, and maintain embedded Python runtime integration in a predominantly C++ engine/host environment.
Own and evolve the Alteryx Python Tool including C++ plugin engines and process lifecycle (server startup, persistence, shutdown).
Develop and troubleshoot SDK engine plugin components (e.g., gRPC-based engine plugins, streaming pipelines) in C++ with Python-facing APIs.
Debug complex native/runtime issues involving DLL/.pyd conflicts, OpenSSL and other native libraries across multiple Python versions.
Lead modernization work around virtualenv/venv management and installer/packaging plumbing , including WiX (installer) and native DLL exports.
Maintain and extend native/compiled Python extensions, ensuring compatibility with modern NumPy/CPython ABIs.
Collaborate with security and platform teams to remediate native library vulnerabilities (e.g., c-ares, libxml2, SQLite, OpenSSL) and keep the SBOM healthy.
Improve and support developer SDKs (v1/v2), including debugging C++/Python streaming and serialization issues for 1P and 3P tool authors.
Drive reliability and performance improvements in engine ↔ Python bridges , focusing on deadlocks, crashes, and high-throughput streaming scenarios.
Contribute to and maintain CI/CD pipelines and code-quality tooling (e.g., C++ docs jobs, coverage, static analysis) affecting C++/Python hybrid repos.
Author and maintain architecture and operational runbooks for C++/Python integration points, including upgrade playbooks for new Python/OpenSSL versions.
Mentor other engineers in best practices for native–Python interop , debugging cross-language issues, and designing robust extension points.
Experience with (REST) API and/or SDK development
MS/BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
Experience with object oriented and functional design patterns
Experience using Git and Git-based pipelines or equivalent
Experience mentoring and developing others
Strong skills in critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, and attention to detail
Growth focused and curious about new challenges and experiences

Nice To Haves

Experience with workflow engines, orchestration systems, job runners, task execution platforms, or runtime infrastructure.
Experience with Kubernetes deployment patterns, GitOps, multi-cluster environments, cloud platform operations, or infrastructure automation.
Experience with messaging systems, event contracts, schema management, asynchronous notification pipelines, or distributed service coordination.
Experience with real-time communication, long-lived connections, service-to-service messaging, or coordination across unreliable networks.
Experience with secure service-to-service authentication, token handling, secrets management, authorization boundaries, or customer-scoped execution contexts.
Experience with log collection, log streaming, distributed workload observability, operational dashboards, or production support tooling.
Node.js
Familiarity with cloud computing / managed services (GCP/Azure/AWS)
Experience or familiarity with AI-driven development in a modern IDE
Front end experience in React or a similar framework including Javascript and JSON
Experience with optimizing protocols and building efficient RPC systems
Networking & concurrency experience
Knowledge and experience with distributed computing, big data and stream processing systems
Container experience: Docker, Kubernetes
Rust and/or Golang familiarity
Experience with a data prep and blend and predictive analytics workflow platform such as Alteryx

Responsibilities

Design and deliver backend services, APIs, workers, and shared libraries that power cloud platform capabilities.
Build and improve systems for orchestrating work across services, including job submission, execution tracking, status propagation, retries, cancellation, results, and operational visibility.
Develop reliable asynchronous and event-driven systems using queues, messaging, background workers, and durable state.
Work on distributed execution flows across platform services, including service-to-service communication, routing, acknowledgements, and failure recovery.
Build and maintain cloud-native runtime infrastructure using containers, Kubernetes, deployment automation, and related platform tooling.
Integrate platform services with persistence layers, event streams, REST APIs, and internal service contracts.
Improve production reliability through metrics, tracing, structured logging, health checks, dashboards, alerting, runbooks, and incident follow-up.
Lead technical design for ambiguous or cross-service work, review code with a systems mindset, and mentor engineers on distributed-system and production-engineering practices.
Collaborate with partner teams to turn product requirements into incremental, testable, and operable platform capabilities.
Use AI and modern development tools to improve engineering productivity, code quality, and delivery speed.
Assist Product Management and SDK team in definition of work (stories, tasks)
Take full ownership of work outcomes including design, development, and testing; support and contribute to DevOps pipeline
Contribute to quality system (framework), with a strong commitment to leading with quality
Participate in code reviews, ensuring our delivery of clean, well-tested, and performant software
Help in the development of a great work environment by being a leader and mentor within the team and working collaboratively across teams