Senior Software Engineer - Stability

Mercury • Portland, OR

3d

About The Position

The year is 1969. The location: Stuttgart, West Germany. Engineers are pacing with strained expressions. They are looking over the Porsche 917, the company's latest attempt at a race car. It's not working properly. The car is one of the most powerful ever built. But drivers describe it as terrifyingly unstable… "a monster". Despite this, Porsche runs it in Le Mans to disastrous results. One of the cars crashes on lap one, ending in tragedy for its driver. All other 917s break down in the race.
Enter John Wyer, a British race engineer, whom the factory calls upon for help. After a long day of testing, John recognizes a lack of smashed bugs on the rear wing and deduces that the wing is not working properly. The team modifies the design to be more upward swept and the 917K takes on a new winning character. It wins LeMans outright in 1970 and goes on to be the most successful race car design of the 70s. Stability, it turns out, was the missing ingredient.
Mercury prides itself in providing powerful banking services. But if those services aren’t reliable, Mercury will fail. The Stability team exists to help product engineers see patterns of instability and remedy them. We champion and improve observability. We've helped define incident response. We have introduced and support robust background work processing. We monitor and build tooling around platform and database health. And with your help, we will explore how to make Mercury even more reliable.

Requirements

• Has expertise in PostgreSQL with query optimization, tuning, replication, pooling/proxying, or client-side libraries
• Has worked with other data systems supporting a relational database: event streaming, OLAP, caches, etc
• Has authored and operated Temporal workflows
• Is familiar with tracing and OpenTelemetry
• Has learned by leading moderate-to-large technical projects, including planning, execution, and stakeholder management
• Has past Site Reliability Engineering or DevOps experience

Nice To Haves

• Has Haskell or other functional programming experience

Responsibilities

• Lead Projects End-to-End: Drive technical projects from concept to production. Define solutions, analyze tradeoffs, make critical decisions, and deliver software that works today and is sustainable for tomorrow.
• Champion Reliability: Make technical choices that improve the reliability of Mercury's systems and make it easier to get reliability by default. Participate in Stability's on-call and advocate for improvements based on that experience.
• Measure Your Outcomes: Define and collect metrics that show how your work creates value for the business.
• Approach Code with Craft: Write clear, testable, and maintainable code. Establish patterns and best practices that Engineering can follow, ensuring long-term scalability and reliability.
• Build for Quality & Sustainability: Design extensible systems, make balanced decisions on tech debt, plan careful rollouts, and own the quality of your work through post-launch monitoring.
• Improve the Developer Experience: Approach problems with a product mindset. Get close to internal customers by supporting them and getting feedback from them. You care as much about the business impact of what you build as the technical design.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed