Senior Software Engineer (C++) Edinburgh, Scotland
Job description
Senior Software Engineer (C++)
Come work on fantastically high-scale systems with us! Blis is an award-winning, global leader and technology innovator in big data analytics and advertising. We help brands such as McDonald's, Samsung, and Mercedes Benz to understand and effectively reach their best audiences. In doing this, we are industry champions in our commitment to the ethical use of data and believe people should have control over their data and privacy. With offices across four continents and over 270 people on the team, we are a truly international company with a global culture and scale. We’re headquartered in the UK, financially successful and stable, and looking forward to continued growth. We’d love it if you could join us on the journey!
We are looking for brilliant, creative, curious, and experienced C++ software engineers to join our real-time applications team. This team is responsible for our high-throughput, low-latency trading and measurement systems that routinely handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second, leveraging multi-level machine learning models covering classification and optimisation, all with a 98th percentile latency of under 20ms. These systems both create and use massive data volumes to make intelligent trades on dozens of global marketplaces. They also help with a range of other offline and online projects, from our proprietary algorithms and systems for location data processing to integrations with third-party technologies. As a tech-first product company, this team works on things that are visible and matter to customers and the business!
Software engineers at Blis are more than just programmers - they’re people who are builders, designers, and problem solvers at heart, people with a passion to make things better. You will help innovate and design new features and products, work with the team to build them, and support and grow them after they’re live. We discuss ‘why’ as much as ‘what’ and ‘how’ in our planning meetings because we want you to see and help shape our future. We value soft boundaries between teams and you’ll get to work with other engineers, data scientists, and product managers to see how it all comes together. As engineers, you’ll help us follow good design principles, especially those inspired by Lean Development, and you’ll enjoy learning, growing, and pushing yourself and the products in new ways. And, of course, you’ll enjoy being part of a team that supports each other through mentoring, brainstorming, and pairing up to solve ambitious challenges.
This is a full-time position based in Scotland for people resident in Scotland, as we work with the Scottish government under an innovators R&D grant. We’ve embraced remote working and expect this to continue. For those that prefer it, some team members routinely co-work at shared offices in Edinburgh. In-person meetings may occasionally be required, although these are infrequent (averaging once a quarter or less). Optionally, the Scottish team has a monthly social night out and everyone is invited to Blis’ twice-yearly parties in London.
The Role:
- Innovate, implement, support, and iterate on our real-time application systems, infrastructure, and code
- Write and improve high-performance, highly efficient, and highly maintainable C++
- Ensure our designs and systems are highly available, resilient, and secure
- Support and mentor other members of the team
Required Knowledge:
- C++, including Boost
- Networking topics from asynchronous connection handling to TCP/IP parameters
- Concurrency
- RESTful APIs and web-serving concepts
- Data structures and algorithms at scale
- Relational and non-relational databases and concepts
- Server-side Linux use and administration
- Cloud infrastructure concepts and utilisation
- Engineering design principles and when to go fast and when to go slow
Desired Knowledge:
- Devops topics including CI/CD, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus & Grafana
- Machine learning algorithms and how to implement them
- Prior work with algorithmic trading systems
- Understanding of compiler output (assembly)
Expected Background:
- 5+ years experience as a systems engineer or architect for complex, high-performance systems
- Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or similar
Key Technologies We Use (not necessarily required for the role):
- Google Cloud, Google Cloud Composer, BigQuery, Spark, Solr, Elasticsearch, Druid, PostgreSQL, ScyllaDB, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Docker, Kubernetes, Kibana, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, Github, C++, Python, Scala, Compiler Explorer
What Blis Can Offer:
We want you to be well and thrive and we care about your growth as a person and in your career. Our benefits include:
- Comprehensive private healthcare, including vision and dental
- Matched pension scheme
- 25 days holiday and one extra day off for your birthday
- Enhanced paternity and maternity leave
- Career coaching and development paths
- “Thanks Ben” flexible spending accounts that you can use on what makes you happy
- Financial coaching from Bippit
- Hybrid working
- … and more!
We are an equal opportunity employer and strongly believe that diversity makes us a better company.
Role Title Synonyms: C++ Engineer, C++ Developer, C++ Systems Engineer
About us
Blis is the audience-first platform that doesn't rely on personal data. We’re an integrated planning and buying platform that delivers scaled, relevant and high-performing audiences, helping the world’s largest brands and media agencies achieve their goals.
Over the past 18 years, Blis has built its reputation on delivering award-winning location-powered advertising solutions. In today’s consumer-centric landscape, Blis is transforming the role of location data by combining it with a broad range of rich and powerful datasets to give our clients the deepest audience understanding available. Our unique approach to integrated planning and buying provides personalised targeting and performance without reliance on personal data. We serve relevant ads to the highest-value addressable audiences across any channel and deliver our clients’ campaign outcomes every time, from brand awareness and engagement through to store/site visits and sales.
Established in the UK in 2004, Blis now operates in more than 40 offices across five continents. Working with the world’s largest and most customer-driven companies across all verticals including Unilever, Samsung, McDonald's, HSBC, Mercedes Benz and Peugeot, as well as every major media agency.
At Blis our vision is to be the undisputed leader in location-powered advertising and analytics. We believe that values create behaviours and behaviours create a culture. Our company values are a huge part of our DNA. We are fully committed to creating a powerful culture of inclusivity and belonging that embraces diversity, encourages people to bring their authentic selves to work, educates everyone at Blis about matters of equality and engages with the wider industry community to drive social change.
As an equal opportunity employer, we treat all our employees and job applicants fairly and equally. We oppose all forms of unlawful and unfair discrimination and take all reasonable steps to create a work environment in which all employees are treated with respect and dignity. We don't condone or tolerate any form of harassment, by employees or by others who do business with us.
Our values
Brave
We're leaders not followers
An innovation and growth mindset helps us solve everyday challenges and achieve breakthroughs. Our passion drives
us to innovate. We don’t see barriers, just possibilities.
We take ownership and hold ourselves accountable for outcomes, good and bad – and we don’t pass the buck.
Love our clients
We're client obsessed
We do what we say and build trusted relationships with our partners for the long term. We act with integrity. We put our clients at the centre of our business. We obsess over the best insights, ideas and solutions to deliver WOW and work with honesty and accountability to get it done.
Inclusive
We're one team
We are empathetic and embrace diversity. Everyone has
a voice and can bring their authentic self to work. We care
about and support each other – with humility and good
humour. Mutual respect and wellbeing are key. We strive
to eliminate bias and be open and transparent.
Solutions driven
We're action oriented
Speed matters in business, so we're solution-driven and
action-oriented. We value simplification and calculated risk taking. We are lean, agile and resourceful self-starters.
We collaborate and break silos, working thoughtfully and
with urgency to solve problems, while learning from mistakes
and celebrating wins.
