Backend Developer

Procedure is hiring for Drover.

This is not a DevOps/SRE/cloud-migration role — this is a hands-on backend engineering and architecture role where you build the platform powering our hardware at scale.

About Drover

Ranching is getting harder. Increased labor costs and a volatile climate are placing mounting pressure to provide for a growing population. Drover is empowering ranchers to efficiently and sustainably feed the world by making it cheaper and easier to manage livestock, unlock productivity gains, and reduce carbon footprint with rotational grazing. Not only is this a $46B opportunity, you'll be working on a climate solution with the potential for real, meaningful impact.

We use patent-pending low-voltage electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to steer and contain cows, replacing the need for physical fences or electric shock. We are building something that has never been done before, and we have hundreds of ranches on our waitlist.

Drover is founded by Callum Taylor (ex-Harvard), who comes from 5 generations of ranching, and Samuel Aubin, both of whom grew up in Australian ranching towns and have an intricate understanding of the problem space. We are well-funded and supported by Workshop Ventures, a VC firm with experience in building unicorn IoT companies.

We're looking to assemble a team of exceptional talent with a high eagerness to dive headfirst into understanding the challenges and opportunities within ranching.

About The Role

As our founding cloud engineer, you will be responsible for building and scaling the infrastructure that powers our IoT platform, connecting thousands of devices across ranches nationwide.

Because we are an early-stage startup, you will have high levels of ownership in what you build. You will play a pivotal part in architecting our cloud infrastructure, building robust APIs, and ensuring our systems can scale reliably. We are looking for someone who is excited about solving complex technical challenges at the intersection of IoT, agriculture, and cloud computing.

What You'll Do

• Develop Drover IoT cloud architecture from the ground up (it’s a green field project)
• Design and implement services to support wearable devices, mobile app, and backend API
• Implement data processing and storage pipelines
• Create and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code
• Support the engineering team across all aspects of early-stage development -- after all, this is a startup

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience developing cloud architecture on AWS
• In-depth understanding of various AWS services, especially those related to IoT
• Expertise in cloud-hosted, event-driven, serverless architectures
• Expertise in programming languages suitable for AWS micro-services (eg: TypeScript, Python)
• Experience with networking and socket programming
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (e.g., Terraform, AWS CDK)
• Familiarity with relational databases (PostgreSQL)
• Familiarity with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Nice To Have

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

Job Description: (Mandate Skills)

• Exceptional architecture and design skills using Object Oriented Programming concepts and Design patterns
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills
• Hands on Java Engineer, with experience building consumer facing or enterprise applications using Java stack
• Ability to manage small teams (2-4 members) using agile development process

Do You Know? (Skills good to have)

• Exposure to building service oriented distributed systems
• In building systems that process big data in a distributed environment, either in real time streaming or offline
• In messaging systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, kinesis, etc.
• In real time computation tools like Storm / Spark or Hadoop based tools.
• In Data warehousing technologies like Redshift, BigQuery, etc.

Responsibilities: 

• Develop backend systems for our first product
• Build reliable, secure and performant backend systems
• Drive test coverage and continuous delivery automation within the team
• Mentor and provide feedback to teammates

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software development experience
• Strong computer science fundamentals
• Deep and wide knowledge of Java ecosystem
• Can write code that is readable, maintainable, secure and performant
• Know the importance of tests and how to approach writing different types of tests
• Good intuition for REST API design
• Deep understanding of relational databases, transactions, entity-relationship modeling
• Comfortable writing highly concurrent systems
• Experienced in using profilers, tuning garbage collection, optimizing SQL queries

Bonus:

• Understanding of domain-driven design concepts like ubiquitous language, bounded contexts, aggregates and domain events
• Know how to use test driven development as a design tool
• Good intuition for the principles underlying object-orientation, particularly encapsulation
• Understand the importance of immutability and of reducing the state-space of objects
• Know how to refactor large codebases safely
• Seek to identify key underlying ideas and use those as building blocks before reaching for shiny new tools

• At least 2-5 years of working experience in web services, preferably in Python
• Should have built and released APIs in production
• Experience working with RDBMS and NoSQL databases
• Designing thoughtful, extensible data models
• Knowledge of identifying, defining and building micro-services
• Working knowledge of GCS, AWS, Azure or any other cloud provider
• Aggressive problem diagnosis and creative problem-solving skills
• Good communication skills - written and spoken