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Backend Engineer - API Traffic Inference

Akita (View all Jobs)

Remote-first

Please mention No Whiteboard if you apply!
I'm a one-man team looking to improve tech interviews, and could use any support! 😄

Interview Process

1. Bug bash 2. An open-ended exercise that involves brainstorming, building a prototype, and team Q&A 3. System design and behavioral components

Programming Languages Mentioned

Swift, Golang, SQL

At Akita, we're making observability accessible to "99% developers."

A big part of the "one-click" observability dream is making it as easy as possible for non-experts to understand what's going on with their systems. Our cutting-edge API traffic inference engine automatically analyzes API traffic to derive insights: everything from the structure of the API endpoints to potential changes of interest to API behavior. We're looking for backend engineers excited about building network traffic analysis, towards empowering developers to understand their systems.

What is Akita?
Today, understanding system behavior is hard. Developers have to instrument their systems; they have to understand logs, metrics, and traces. At Akita, we're building a new kind of observability solution that does not require an internal expert to install and operate. Our solution has two main parts: an eBPF-based approach for automatically watching API traffic and automatic inference over the API traffic

Akita was founded by Jean Yang, previously a CMU professor with over ten years of experience in programming systems research and over two years of experience with Taylor Swift memes on Twitter. Akita is backed by two of the top VC firms, as well as a major NBA player and some other incredible angel investors. 🏀😇

Who works at Akita?
We're remote-first, work together closely, and get the most excited when we build something that helps our users. We believe in shipping quickly and often, learning, and iterating. We love dogs and also cats. You can learn more about our team here.

About you
  • You're a builder. You love building software systems and have 2+ years of experience working on observability/monitoring, compilers, program analysis, or other related language tooling.
  • You're comfortable sharing drafts, getting feedback, and iterating. You have experience working closely with others and changing course based on feedback. You find this way of working fun.
  • You’re scrappy. You know what it takes to ship high-quality production software, but you’re also happy taking judicious shortcuts and even deliberately incurring tech debt to get the job done. You're looking for a fast-moving team that fits the way you work.
  • You’re versatile. You've gone deep, but you're flexible across your toolbox and are willing to do what it takes to solve a hard problem.
    • What you'll do at Akita
  • Design and implement improvements and extensions to our framework for automatically inferring structured API models from network traffic.
  • Diagnose and address issues in API model inference.
  • Design and implement improvements to our stored model format and migrate existing data, in collaboration with database & agent engineers.
  • Design, develop, and implement strategies for detecting changes in API behavior, in the presence of uncertainty and incomplete data.
  • Diagnose and address issues in detecting changes to API models.
  • Optimize time and space usage of model inference and diffing.
  • Design and implement analysis frameworks as needed.
    • You're a good fit if you have
  • 2+ years backend engineering experience
  • Strong programming and algorithms fundamentals
  • Strong attention to detail
  • Ability to collaborate remotely on tasks that may change scope
  • Ability to prioritize work in a dynamic environment
    • You'll have an edge if you have
  • Experience with backend work on observability/monitoring tools
  • Experience with other tooling for distributed systems
  • Experience with compiler technologies: ASTs, type systems, visitor frameworks
  • Experience with program analysis or runtime systems
  • Experience with CPU and memory optimization
    • Not necessary for this role
  • College degree
  • Tech lead experience
  • Experience with production cloud engineering
  • Experience designing/architecting systems from scratch
  • Past experience working at a startup
  • Experience with Go, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, or Terraform
    • Tech stack
  • Go
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker; Kubernetes
  • AWS; Terraform
  • Competitive salary and equity packages.
  • Generous health and dental insurance. 401(k) plan.
  • Work from anywhere in the US, as long as there is a significant overlap with 9am-6pm Pacific time.
    • If you're excited to build build the future of observability with a small, capable team, we'd love to hear from you.

    Akita is an equal-opportunity employer.

    Please mention No Whiteboard if you apply!
    I'm a one-man team looking to improve tech interviews, and could use any support! 😄

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