Slack enables people all over the world to communicate and collaborate together. Teams of all scales — from the world’s largest public companies to the smallest of startups — use Slack to get work done, so we take performance and reliability very seriously. A taste of our scale:
For millions of people, Slack is the primary communication tool they use at work all day long. They expect it to be exceptionally reliable and fast, all the time.
We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. Our team maintains and builds the lower levels of our stack, including:
We know we’ve done our job correctly when none of our users think about us. We don’t typically ship new user-facing features, but rather ensure our systems are incredibly performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable. In other words, Slack just works seamlessly.
Slack's API and web backend is built on PHP/Hack, and our backend services are written in Java and Go. Our data infrastructure is built on Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, Presto, Spark, and MySQL/Vitess. Our former Chief Architect, Keith Adams, spoke about our architecture at QCon in 2016. Bing Wei and Michael Demmer, Backend Engineers on our team spoke about Flannel (our homegrown application aware cache) at QCon in 2017 and Vitess/MySQL at Percona Live in 2017 respectively.
The performance infrastructure team is small but mighty. We strive to help engineers identify critical performance problems early and build an inclusive performance-minded culture. We build tooling that enables anyone at Slack to spot bottlenecks quickly, including safe and reliable load testing systems, and pre-merge performance regression monitoring. (One of our engineers gave a talk about one of these tools at Strange Loop in 2019).
We rapidly iterate and work closely with other teams in engineering to ensure Slack stays snappy for teams of all sizes. We are ambitious, pragmatic team-players. If you want to work on a collaborative team solving big scale and performance problems, then look no further!
Slack has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture—we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?
Slack is registered as an employer in many, but not all, provinces. If you are not located in or able to work from a province where Slack is registered, you will not be eligible for employment. Visa sponsorship may not be available in certain remote locations.
Visa sponsorship is not available for candidates living outside the country of this position.