Who we are
A Thinking Ape builds communities through mobile games with emergent social play and original IP. We released our first game in 2009 and have been profitable and growing every year since. We are a bottom-up-driven company of small teams exercising product ownership and data-driven decision-making. Our portfolio of games is growing, and with it, our ability to provide for more communities.
The team
Our data team is the newest functional unit born inside the company consisting of product analysts and data engineers. As a team whose vision is to better inform decision making through insights from data, we lead many initiatives around building data-analytics pipelines that improve our efficiency in data acquisition, accessibility, and analysis. We collaborate closely with other disciplines from the marketing and product teams to provide critical support for the growth of our games.
The job
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will leverage your software development skills and experience to help improve our data stack. You will look at how we can transform data more efficiently and visualize insights more performantly. In addition, you’ll participate in the system design and architecture of our in-house big data platform and work on related machine learning projects that greatly influence the decision making in both product and marketing. Being a member of the data team, you are going to have lots of opportunities to make a significant impact and to shape the future of the team and its operation.
Things you will work on
You’ll be responsible for improving, managing and scaling different components of our data-analytics stack on top of the ever growing dataset of millions of players, as well as helping build the machine learning platform that significantly improves iteration speed and accelerates adoptions. You’ll contribute by:
- Building various components that help train and serve ML models at scale
- Creating and extending tooling around our cloud data warehouse and BI platform
- Developing technical solutions to support and automate product experiment and iteration processes
- Improving existing neural network models to better assist decision making
- Introducing new machine learning applications that transforms data usage across multiple products
The primary qualifications we’re looking for are
- 4+ years of experience in a Data Engineer role
- A background in software development
- Tech generalist skills and enthusiasm about data and its application
- A solid track record of driving the development of scalable backend services and systems
- Strong knowledge in technologies in the big data ecosystem, particularly widely adopted open source solutions such as Kafka, Spark, Airflow, and etc
- Hands-on experience with SQL, databases, and data warehousing
- Ability to communicate thoughts and ideas clearly in code and in writing
Other things that help
- Experience with popular Python libraries commonly used by the data science community
- Experience with Google BigQuery, Looker, and/or other cloud-based data-warehouses and BI platforms
- Project management experience
Remote first
We have committed to a remote first approach with access to in-person collaboration spaces in Vancouver. This means our roles are currently open to candidates who can work in Canada between the core hours of 11am - 4pm PST. We are open to help relocate the successful candidate to Canada.
While everyone on our team is different, to thrive here you should...
- Be self motivated, take pride in your work and enjoy huge amounts of ownership
- Set aside your ego and have wonderful arguments with your coworkers in order to create something better than any one person could individually
- Challenge your own assumptions and use data to make decisions whenever possible
- Be passionate about teaching others what you know and continuing your own growth every day
- Not be afraid to fail–you experiment and learn from your mistakes
What’s in it for you
At ATA you’re offered a flexible, safe, inclusive environment in which you have the autonomy to do your best work, surrounded by a strong team and with the encouragement of supportive leadership that doesn’t just care what you’re doing, but how you’re doing. You’re trusted, respected, listened to, cared for and valued. You take on thought-provoking projects and tackle fun problems alongside people who are equally invested in making meaningful contributions and seeing new ideas come to life. You know how your work aligns with the company’s goals. Your career is given the space and resources to progress. You accomplish things that make you proud. You are compensated competitively, your health and wellbeing are top priorities and you enjoy plenty of perks. You build communities, take ownership, have wonderful arguments, let the best ideas win and keep growing. You don’t just work for ATA, you are an integral part of ATA.
Our commitment to inclusion
We build communities. To do this to the best of our abilities, we need a workforce that reflects the diverse player communities we serve. We believe a variety of perspectives and experiences allows us to make better decisions and understand the needs of our players. We work hard to create an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work and feel like they belong at ATA.
Please consider applying even if you don't meet every qualification and let us know if you require any accommodations or support during the recruitment process.
Discover even more
Check out our story to find out how we got to where we are today, and learn about our culture by following @athinkingape on social. You can also listen to Kenshi Arasaki, ATA CEO & Co-Founder, talk about what it’s like to work here.