Sr. Software Development Engineer

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">Immigration / Work Authorization Notice:</strong></span><strong data-stringify-type="bold"> </strong></strong>Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States. iSpot is not able to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this position at this time.</p> <p>iSpot competes for the best talent. Our compensation packages consist of salary and equity in one of Seattle’s hottest start-ups, as well as other standard benefits. Most importantly, we provide a really interesting working experience, and the chance to contribute to the success of something great.</p></div><h3><strong>What You’ll Be Part Of:</strong></h3> <p>At iSpot.tv, we deal with BIG data, operating in a high-scale AWS environment with thousands of servers processing massive streams of media metadata. As a Senior SDE, you are a foundational pillar of our engineering team. You don’t just write code; you own entire domains, drive scalable solutions, and act as a “go-to” expert.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>We are currently looking for an AI-native engineer—someone who views AI not as a novelty, but as a core component of their development lifecycle—to help lead our mission-critical data evolution, and contributing to the vision of the Creative, Audience, and Outcomes pillars.</p> <h3><strong>Responsibilities:</strong></h3> <p><strong>Technical Excellence &amp; Domain Ownership</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Coding &amp; Debugging:</strong> Design domains with testability and multiple teams in mind, creating extensible and shareable codebases. Provide prescriptive code reviews that suggest more acceptable code patterns and contribute to company-wide style guidelines.</li> <li><strong>Quality &amp; Release:</strong> Maintain a high standard of quality, setting the example for the team. Develop the architecture for our automation systems and expertly debug complex issues within the CI/CD pipeline. Implement secure deployment strategies, especially for large-scale, high-risk projects.</li> </ul> <p><strong>AI-Driven Productivity &amp; Innovation</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>AI-First Mindset:</strong> Be “AI-native.” Actively explore and learn about AI technologies that enhance the efficiency of the entire team’s work.</li> <li><strong>Leading Adoption:</strong> Don’t just use AI; “create space” for teammates to improve their AI tooling through pairing, providing demos, and writing documentation.</li> <li><strong>Creative Problem Solving:</strong> Act as a pioneer in critical technologies, bringing creative solutions to complex, large-scale projects and ensuring your contributions can be extended far into the future.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Operational Excellence &amp; Data Strategy</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Data-Driven RCA:</strong> Propose and implement viable domain measurement solutions. Play a lead role in researching external solutions and leading root cause analysis (RCA) for complex, multi-domain incidents.</li> <li><strong>Operational Efficiency &amp; Toil Reduction:</strong> Proactively improve the current state of operations by identifying and reducing toil. Apply a “Platform Engineering” mindset to automate repetitive manual tasks, ensuring the team remains focused on high-value engineering.</li> <li><strong>Scalability &amp; Influence:</strong> Build internal networks to improve organizational speed and the quality of technology solutions, removing obstacles for the team as they arise. Serve as the “go-to” person for the team, identifying trends and introducing broad solutions to address systemic issues.</li> <li><strong>Cost-Conscious Engineering:</strong> Drive a mature cost-optimization strategy, ensuring that architectural decisions and cloud resource utilization are both performant and cost-efficient. Balance technical excellence with business value, treating cost-consciousness as a core pillar of system reliability.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Leadership &amp; Collaboration</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Strategic Alignment:</strong> Routinely work cross-functionally to align partners and stakeholders with the project vision and strategy.</li> <li><strong>Mentorship:</strong> Mentor less experienced team members, ensuring your communication promotes clarity and inspires action. Onboard and coach other engineers in adopting an AI-first mindset, focusing on low-risk strategies.</li> <li><strong>Conflict Resolution:</strong> Handle personal conflicts within the team and navigate ambiguity to reach strategic milestones.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Qualifications and Education Requirements:</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Experience:</strong> Significant experience developing software for shareable features across multiple engineering projects. Experience leading small-to-mid-sized technical initiatives is required.</li> <li><strong>Architectural Leadership:</strong> Proven ability to make high-level architectural decisions, including redesigning legacy services to ensure they are highly reliable and operable. Follows industry best practices for high-availability API design and the streamlining of complex database operations.</li> <li><strong>Platform Engineering:</strong> Hands-on experience with Platform Engineering principles, focusing on internal developer experience, infrastructure abstraction, and building self-service capabilities for engineering teams.</li> <li><strong>Cloud Native:</strong> Expert knowledge of AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, IAM).</li> <li><strong>Tech Required:</strong> Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, RabbitMQ (or similar message broker), Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, CI/CD pipelines.</li> <li><strong>AI Native:</strong> Experience using AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development (e.g., Kiro, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor, or similar, Claude Code).</li> <li><strong>Soft Skills:</strong> Strong communication skills with the ability to tailor messaging to different audiences (from j