If you want to get paid to lurk on the Thinkbox forum all day this your chance! That’s no joke, it’s a project I want to get off the ground. The postings for new support engineers can be found here on Amazon.jobs.
Specifically we’re looking for two networking experts (one entry level, one intermediate) to help with something new we’re cooking up, and one software engineering expert to help out with all those gnarly rendering problems that we’re known for solving. You’ll need to be within a few hour’s drive of a team office so expect relocation to either Vancouver or Winnipeg (where I am!) if you’re not there already.
On the social side, we put a large focus on the leadership principles (LPs). You should understand them going into the interview and be prepared with stories (including the situation, task, action you took, and measurable results) that prove your soft skills in those areas. Some stories can tackle multiple LPs.
The job poster is a bit generic so specifically for each role, I’ve listed the things you should prepare for in a day long interview (it can be hard for introverts). That said, we don’t expect you to be able to handle everything listed for a role. If you can, you’re overqualified and probably won’t enjoy the challenge as much as you could. You’re welcome anyway, but I’d prefer to be able to teach you some things.
For the Networking roles:
- Able to break down a networking problem and troubleshoot to the root cause
- Dig into ambiguous situations and ask the right questions to gain clarity
- Knowledge of the network stack, addressing, firewalls, HTTP(s), routing, VPN, TLS
- Knowledge of Linux command line tools used for troubleshooting networking issues
- Troubleshooting techniques and tools on Linux servers for performance (disk, network, memory) and file system permissions.
- Linux server management and maintenance
- Diagramming a production network for a service (complexity and fault tolerance to scale with role level)
- Knowledge of web server and other common networking service’s configuration (intermediate)
- Find the root cause of performance problems on Linux servers (intermediate)
- Maintain and grow a network (intermediate)
- Evaluate a deployment for best practices (intermediate)
For the Software Engineering role:
- Experience in developing applications in one or more programming languages (C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Rust, etc.)
- Experience with version control and CI/CD pipelines
- Experience securing APIs (authentication, rate limiting, etc.)
- Experience with object oriented concepts
- Understanding and usage of data structures and algorithms (hashmaps, (de)queues, arrays)
- Able to break down a difficult software problem and troubleshoot to the root cause
- Evaluate source code solutions for best practices
- Maintain and grow a software project, including prioritizing effort and making tradeoffs and scaling the solution
- Troubleshooting techniques and tools for web applications and basic connection problems
- Knowledge of networking fundamentals
- Knowledge of Linux command line tools
- Application load balancing (HTTP or others)
- Linux server management and maintenance
- Task automation and shell scripts (ideally)