Senior Software Engineer

Quora Is A Remote-First Company

At Quora, we're on a mission to grow and share the world's knowledge. Our primary products include:

• Quora: A global knowledge-sharing platform with over 400 million monthly unique visitors, enabling individuals to connect and exchange insights on diverse topics.

• Poe: A dynamic platform that allows millions of users to chat and explore a variety of AI language models, providing instant integration of cutting-edge AI capabilities.

Our teams are passionate, collaborative, and dedicated to making a meaningful impact. We foster a culture rooted in transparency and experimentation, enabling everyone to celebrate successes and grow through meaningful work. Join us in our journey to create a positive change in the world

This position is focused on enhancing our Quora product.

About The Team And The Role

Our Data Infrastructure Team is responsible for everything related to data, including data lakes, pipelines, query engines, experimentation frameworks, and data visualization tools. We utilize a variety of open-source technologies such as Kafka, Hive, Trino, Spark, and Airflow, alongside our own in-house systems. As a team member, you will engage in designing and scaling our existing infrastructure, improving system reliability, and collaborating with other teams to enhance tooling and promote effective data usage across the company. We seek an individual excited about optimizing and redesigning our data architecture and pipelines to support ambitious new data initiatives.

Discover Our Team's Exciting Projects

Explore our standout achievements that highlight innovation and teamwork at Quora:

• Migrating a Decade of Redshift Usages to Trino: Learn how we transformed our data ecosystem to boost efficiency and performance

• Revamping the Spark Ecosystem: Discover how we enhanced Spark to make it even more powerful and user-friendly for our engineering teams

• Presenting Trino's Fault-tolerant Execution Mode: Highlights from our presentation at the Trino Summit, focusing on building resilience in data processing

We invite you to get inspired by our impact and imagine the possibilities for your career with us

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable and efficient data architectures that meet the needs of data scientists, engineers, and business partners.

• Identify and implement improvements for cost efficiency in data storage and processing.

• Use your expertise to model structured and unstructured data, owning these models and serving as a consultant for partner teams.

• Champion best practices in system use and uphold high-quality coding standards.

• Participate in the on-call rotation, addressing reliability incidents as they arise.

Minimum Requirements

• Ability to be available for meetings and timely communication during Quora's coordination hours (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time).

• 4+ years of experience in Data Infrastructure.

• Flexibility to work on various Data Engineering systems, addressing the company’s highest priority areas.

• Operational mindset capable of problem diagnosis, root cause analysis, performance tuning, and incident management.

• Proficiency in Python and SQL query design.

• Experience with big data processing frameworks like Hive, Spark, and Trino.

• Experience building data-intensive applications (high velocity/high volume).

• Experience with SQL/NoSQL data stores and data lake operations.

Preferred Requirements

• Hands-on experience with AWS technologies like S3, EC2, RDS, EKS, or Apache Iceberg.

• A flexible and positive team player with strong interpersonal skills.

At Quora, we value diversity and inclusivity and welcome individuals from all backgrounds, encouraging women and underrepresented groups in tech to apply. We believe a diverse array of perspectives enriches our products and culture.

Additional Information

We accept applications on an ongoing basis. This role is a backfill for an existing vacancy.

Quora offers competitive benefits, including medical/dental/vision coverage, equity refreshers, remote work reimbursement, paid time off, employee assistance programs, and more. Benefits may vary based on location.

• US candidates only: For applicants based in the US, the salary range is $155,656 - $225,160 USD + equity + benefits.

• Canada candidates only: For applicants based in Toronto and Vancouver, the salary range is $201,613 - $233,311 CAD + equity + benefits. For all other locations in Canada, the salary range is $188,172 - $217,757 CAD + equity + benefits.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Please note: While AI technology may assist in sorting applications and recording interview notes, final decisions are made by our team members.