About Upwave

Upwave is the Brand Intelligence Platform. We make brand marketing more impactful. Upwave plans, measures, and optimizes brand marketing. With our Brand Campaign Measurement and Instant Insights products, we provide a software & data platform to the world’s largest brand marketers. Our customers are Fortune 500 companies across multiple verticals - including CPG, food & beverage, consumer technology & telecom, and financial services - as well as the world’s largest advertising agencies and media platforms. We are unapologetically supportive of brand advertising, and work hard every day to prove its value; we know if companies can measure the value of those dollars, they’ll spend more. Brand advertising pays for not only the movies we watch and music we hear, but the journalism we read and the information we access. In short, brand advertising supports the free flow of information through society. So, we’re proud to be the first company dedicated to using data science to show enterprises the true effectiveness of their brand spend. We are backed by leading venture investors (Y Combinator, Uncork Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Initialized Capital, PivotNorth, Ridge Ventures, Industry Ventures, Conductive Ventures,) and leading MarTech founders & CEOs. We’re a humble but ambitious team that takes its work seriously but never ourselves. Come join us.

About the role

Skills: Java, Kubernetes, Spring Framework, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

About the role:

The most successful companies understand that data and analysis are the foundation of any effective business strategy. Modern enterprises live and breathe data that they leverage through all sorts of dedicated analytics platforms: customer, product, supply chain, finance, etc. But until now, there’s never been an effective software solution to understand, measure, and optimize companies’ most important asset: their brand. Upwave is a venture-funded startup building the Brand Intelligence Platform. We offer a comprehensive set of tools that help our Fortune 100 clients understand and improve how they’re perceived in the marketplace, how aware consumers are of the value they provide, and how much consumers trust them to provide the value they promise.

Upwave has already built the industry’s leading toolkit for gathering, analyzing, and exploring data on consumer brand perception. Our tools are used daily by managers and marketers at many of the world’s best known brands (like Amazon and American Express) and Upwave is now ready to step on the gas and scale up until we become the de facto industry standard. That means constantly working to deeply understand our users' needs and to reliably scale our existing platform while still building new analytical tools to help marketers ask and answer their most urgent strategic questions.

Our Product Engineering team is small but moves fast by emphasizing sustainable high-quality software development, high developer autonomy, the “DevOps” philosophy, strong and empathetic communication, and great collaboration.

We need a highly senior engineer like you with broad and deep experience to provide strong technical leadership across multiple areas of our technical systems, spanning from our React-based dashboard to our Spring/Microservice-based API to our Kubernetes/Terraform-based AWS infrastructure. Some of the world’s largest companies already use Upwave’s tools to guide hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing budget. In this role, you’ll be able to have an immediate, pivotal, visible impact on our tools and systems while working across a wide variety of cutting edge technologies, all in the company of a friendly, supportive team.

About you:

• You have experience with end-to-end development of powerful, intuitive, highly-functional products for professional end users. You’ve built robust, high-quality API-consuming applications before (whether single-page web apps, mobile apps, or cloud-powered desktop apps). You don't need to be familiar with the particular technology we use, but you should have built real RDBMS-backed backends in one (or more) framework like Spring Boot, Django, Rails, or Express and should have built SPA frontends in a modern JavaScript framework like React, Vue, or Angular.

• You deeply understand and enjoy programming. You’re familiar with the modern landscape of user interface frameworks, web/API/microservice frameworks, databases, and cloud platforms. You know which approaches to embrace and avoid, and when to reach for a new tool vs. relying on a proven one.

• You value and practice rigorous software engineering methodology.

• You believe developers should operate the systems they build. You think about observability, cost, and reliability as a fundamental part of software design and you design systems that are easy to operate and maintain. You deeply understand the power and promise of cloud infrastructure, and you have enough experience building in the cloud to know where the pitfalls are and how to avoid them.

• You like solving real-world business problems. Our clients use our data to make their businesses more effective, and you’ll use your skills to turn theoretical ideas into concrete tools and improvements that will help Upwave satisfy our clients. You should enjoy collaborating with Product on specs and designs that solve real needs and will delight end users.

• People tend to look to you as a leader and respect your expertise, even in roles where you don't have formal authority. You have experience mentoring junior team mates, and you understand that healthy human systems are essential to developing and maintaining healthy technical systems.

• You’re humble and curious. You care about understanding the world around you and want to learn more about why it works the way it does. You understand that you’ll be responsible for making sure we end up with great systems by making sure the best ideas win, even if those ideas aren’t yours.

• You’re a get-things-done type who fixes problems instead of worrying about who’s responsible for fixing them. You own and take responsibility for your actions and your work and you want to stake out meaningful areas of expertise within the constant swirl and change of startup life.

• You believe that well-oiled, high-trust teams are more effective than the sum of their parts. You know that participating effectively in a team takes deliberate effort and compassionate, effective, and non-violent communication. Upwave works hard to foster a welcoming, inclusive climate where people feel safe and supported and actually want to work with each other. You’re comfortable being evaluated for what you add to the team, not just what you add to the codebase.

Bonus points:

• Experience working with a JVM-based language (particularly Java or Groovy) and a Spring-based web framework (particularly Spring Boot or Groovy-on-Grails).

• Strong familiarity and comfort with data management both through RDMBS (particularly MySQL) and NoSQL stores (particularly DynamoDB and Presto).

• Experience working with React/Redux.

• Experience working on cloud-native applications (particularly on AWS), particularly using Kubernetes and Terraform

• Experience at a startup or fast-growing company.

• Experience with marketing technology, advertising technology, or market research companies.

Why You’ll Like Working Here:

Upwave is an engineering-first company. We believe high velocity comes from high efficiency, not high effort. And we believe that the development we do must be sustainable for the entire team. We set priorities rather than deadlines, we don’t crunch, we work reasonable hours, and engineers and managers actually take vacations.
Upwavers treat each other well. We screen for people who are unusually caring, and who want to collaborate and know how to do it effectively and compassionately.
Upwave is actually disrupting (in the Clayton Christensen sense) a major industry by offering functionality that our users can’t find anywhere else, at a technology-enabled price point that our services-oriented competitors structurally can’t match. The media industry is going through major tectonic shifts, and at Upwave you’ll both observe and influence the media industry’s reinvention.
You’ll work with modern technologies (e.g. React, Kubernetes, AWS) to solve cutting edge problems. Upwave is not just another software-as-a-service tool; we’re an intuitive user-interface on top of a deep and complex business workflow that requires:
collecting hundreds of billions of advertising events,
using them intelligently to collect consumer sentiment data,
applying recently published (and in some cases, internally invented) causal inference and machine learning techniques to derive statistically valid conclusions,
presenting those conclusions to end users in a way that empowers them to make genuinely better business decisions.
We’re “post product market fit”, meaning that we’re far enough along in our journey to know that we’re building something real users find valuable enough to pay (handsomely) for. But we’re playing in a huge market, and we’re early enough along that each individual engineer and engineering leader can still have a pivotal impact on our product and on the overall trajectory and success of our business.
We’re a remote-first team, with members spanning half the globe (but only one half, to ensure everyone can talk live when we need to). You’ll work with extremely talented engineers from different states, countries, and cultures, and you’ll get to learn about their diverse backgrounds and fascinating day-to-day experiences and life stories.
We offer highly competitive compensation, benefits, and employee equity.

Technology

Currently at Upwave, we have four major tiers of architecture:

Our data ingestion pipeline

Our pipeline records advertising exposure and targeting information, and ingests over 200 billion records per month (and growing fast).

Tech used:

AWS (S3, CloudFront, Athena, Route53, EMR, DynamoDB, etc)
MySql
Java
Grails
Cassandra

Our statistical systems

Our statistical systems perform statistical analysis and cutting-edge causal inference on the data we collect by interviewing consumers.

Tech used

Python
Pandas
PyData tools (e.g. NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, etc)
Jupyter notebooks
Falcon
AWS Batch

Our results dashboard

Our results dashboard allows our customers to seamlessly explore, visualize, and drill deep into the performance of their marketing campaigns.

Tech used:

React
Redux
Webpack
AngularJS (being phased out)

Our backend web API

Our API powers our customer interviewing platform and our end user data consumption dashboard.

Tech used:

Groovy On Grails
Spring Boot
Kubernetes
MySQL

Upwave remote jobs

Senior Software Engineer

Staff / Principal Product Engineer