A Day In The Life: Staff API Engineer

What does your day-to-day look like working as a Staff Software Engineer?

I help develop large-scale data collection systems that impact multiple organizations in the company. My specialty is in complex API requests and responses between mobile apps and servers. As the technical landscape is constantly evolving, so are the professional tools needed to tackle the problems we face. I’ve developed some special tools to enhance this process, and Sensor Tower has licensed some tools for domain specific tools that aid in this work. When the Ad Intelligence team faces impossible problems with our data collection, that’s when I get really excited to apply my experience and creativity in developing innovative solutions.

At Sensor Tower, what is the difference between office-based and remote employees?

Sensor Tower supports fully remote employees, and I am one of those, based in Austin, Texas. In fact our entire Ad Intelligence team works remotely, in six countries in the USA, South America, Europe, and Eastern Europe. We have offices in Los Angeles, New York, and London (and a reopening coming for our HQ in San Francisco), so any staff in those cities have the option to work in the office or from home. We also have had opportunities to travel and gather as a team to have face-to-face time and get to know each other more personally. Because Sensor Tower is a remote-friendly company, with our communication technologies, we all can work closely together across many time zones and collaborate with talented engineers all over the world.

How do you collaborate with your team as a remote employee?

Working remotely is obviously not the same as working every day with your colleagues in the office, but doesn’t mean it cannot be as productive or fun! We use Slack as our main tool for quick conversations. Zoom is our video conferencing tool for meetings and helps us feel a personal connection. I also participate in pair-programming or group work sessions over Zoom for major project work. We use cross-platform tools such as Live Share for VS Code to co-edit files in real-time. Cross-platform tools are essential as team members choose their preferred OS, be it Windows, Linux, or macOS. There’s also a lot of cultural diversity on the team, but we all share the same passion for challenging work in advertising, which is one of the hot tech industries. 

How do you work with Technical Program Managers?

Our manager was a TPM at Amazon for several years, and he performs some of the TPM functions, but since we added so many engineers in 2021, he’s spread pretty thin across other responsibilities. We’re looking forward to having full-time TPMs dedicated to each of our smaller engineering groups and collaborating with outside stakeholders so that we can stay focused on R&D and coding.

What flavor of Agile do you practice?

Whatever works! We have two teams working in 2-week sprints with daily standup meetings and all the scrum rituals. But we also work together as a team to make improvement tweaks. We hold a joint demo at the end of the sprint. Engineers take ownership for the meetings and rotate scrum leaders. Sprint retrospectives help us align on what works and what processes need improvement, we use that feedback to steer ourselves towards working in an optimal fashion.

Why Join Sensor Tower?

Products

We offer unique insights into the digital marketplace for mobile apps and app stores, consumer app usage, digital advertising, and brands with our recent acquisition of Pathmatics.

Customers

We serve small, independent and Fortune 1000 customers alike, spanning the mobile games, travel & hospitality, music, finance, CPG, and broadcast entertainment markets. We offer our suite of products on free, small-medium-size business, and enterprise tiers to make it accessible to the broadest range of customers. 

Media

We are cited by the world’s leading news and finance media: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Washington Post, and Reuters. 

Our Background

We are a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco and was a member of AngelPad’s startup incubator program in 2013. We were named one of the 50 Tech Companies to Know in 2020 and Best Midsize Companies to Work For 2022 by BuiltIn.

After seven years of building Sensor Tower off of $1MM (Seed, 2013), we were funded $45MM growth investment in 2020. Read more about it here, in the words of our co-founders.

We have a birds-eye view of the entire mobile app ecosystem, and we keep our teams constantly abreast of the latest mobile app trends, news, and best practices.

Our Benefits

We offer unlimited vacation time, health and wellness stipends, flexible work hours, 401K, team trips (white water rafting, Hawaii, and weekend Tahoe mansion trips to name a few), and more.

We grant stock options to all of our employees because we recognize that everybody plays an integral role in our success—all employees should be invested in Sensor Tower (both figuratively and literally).

Our COVID-19 specific benefits include: 

• Stipend to set up your home office and/or gym

• WiFi stipend

• Daily meal stipend

• Virtual team events

Our Values

We are daily driven by our core values: Customer-Focused, Innovative, Continuously Learning, Action-Oriented, Respectful, Data & Metrics-Driven. 

Consistent with our “Respectful” value, Sensor Tower is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.