About The Role
Every Foundry squad — DES, Sizer, GCM, Emulator, Layout Designer — depends on a common platform layer: the catalog service that describes what robots and configurations exist, the schema-contract APIs that ensure squads speak the same language, the Agent Model Registry that tracks what has been deployed, and the map-versioning infrastructure that lets designs evolve without breaking downstream consumers. As an SDE2 on the Platform & Data squad you build and maintain these foundational services. Your work will rarely be user-visible, but it will unblock every other squad. Reliability, API clarity and backward compatibility are the quality bar.
What You'll Do
- Build the catalog service — Implement and maintain the central catalog that describes robot types, configuration templates and capability metadata; expose it via a versioned REST API consumed by all squads.
- Implement schema-contract APIs — Build the contract-first APIs (OpenAPI / Protobuf) that define the lingua franca between squads; version them correctly and guard against breaking changes.
- Build the Agent Model Registry — Implement the registry that maps deployed GreyMatter configurations to Foundry solution designs; support lookup, diffing and validation.
- Own map versioning — Build the versioned store for warehouse map snapshots: branching, merging, rollback and change-history APIs.
- Contribute to platform validation infra — Build the shared validation library and CLI that squads invoke to check their artifacts before promoting them through the pipeline.
- Maintain backward compatibility — Own the deprecation and migration process for APIs and schemas; write migration guides and tooling when breaking changes are necessary.
- Write production-quality tests — Unit and integration tests for all services; participate in the on-call rotation for platform services.
- Document what you build — Maintain OpenAPI specs, ADRs and TechDocs entries in Backstage so other squads can self-serve.
Minimum (required) Qualifications
- 4–8 years professional backend engineering.
- Proficiency in Java or Go for microservice development.
- Experience designing and documenting REST APIs (OpenAPI / Swagger).
- Solid relational-database skills (PostgreSQL or similar): schema design, indexing, migration management.
- Understanding of API versioning strategies and backward-compatibility patterns.
- Comfortable with containerisation (Docker) and deploying to Kubernetes.
- Experience writing unit and integration tests; CI/CD awareness.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building platform or infrastructure services consumed by multiple teams.
- Familiarity with gRPC / Protobuf for service-to-service communication.
- Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub or similar).
- PostGIS or other spatial-data extensions experience.
- Schema-registry or catalog-system experience.
- Exposure to multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
- Experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code.
Technical Qualifications
- Languages: Java (Spring Boot) or Go; Python acceptable for tooling.
- APIs: REST (OpenAPI 3.x), gRPC / Protobuf for internal services.
- Databases: PostgreSQL (JSONB, migrations with Flyway / Liquibase); Redis for caching.
- Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes (GKE on GCP), Helm charts; Terraform for IaC.
- Observability: structured JSON logging; Prometheus metrics; distributed tracing; Grafana dashboards.
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, trunk-based development; affected-only build strategies in the monorepo.
- Service registry: Backstage catalog-info.yaml; TechDocs for service documentation.
- Security: JWT / OAuth2 for API auth; secrets management via GCP Secret Manager.
- Testing: JUnit / Go test; testcontainers for integration; contract tests with Pact or similar.
How We Work
Platform & Data is the squad that every other squad depends on. You will be expected to treat API consumers as your customers — gather requirements from squad Tech Leads, communicate changes early and never break a contract silently. You work autonomously on task-sized items, surface blockers in the weekly sync, and participate in the platform on-call rotation (light duty at this stage).
